Open data from hikes.guide
We compile a lot of Lake District data to build this site, and we’re happy to share it. These datasets are free to download and reuse with credit — for research, journalism, a school project, or your own maps and apps. Each is a plain CSV; each carries its own sources on our data sources page. Spot an error? Let us know.
The Lake District fell database
540 Lake District fells and tops: name, height, coordinates, region, list membership (Wainwright, Outlying, Birkett and more), an OS National Grid reference and a Wikidata ID where known.
Fields: height, latitude, longitude, region, list membership, OS grid reference, Wikidata ID.
Lake District Mountain Rescue statistics
Call-out counts and context for the Lake District mountain rescue teams, set in the England & Wales picture. Behind the Mountain Rescue Data Report.
Fields: call-outs by year, per-team counts, causes, seasonality.
Lake District climate statistics
Long-run temperature, rainfall and air-frost series for the Lake District district, from the Met Office. Behind the Lake District Climate Report.
Fields: mean temperature, rainfall, air-frost days.
The Lake District lakes & waters dataset
The main lakes and waters: area, depth, length, swimming and boating status.
Fields: area, max depth, length, swimming, boating.
The Lake District waterfalls dataset
The guided waterfalls: an (approximate) height, walk, difficulty, access flags and spate-dependence.
Fields: height, walk, difficulty, access, spate-dependence.
Lake District beck-water metals
Environment Agency dissolved lead, cadmium, zinc and copper at sampling points within 250 m of our walking routes, against drinking-water limits, with the abandoned mines that pollute them. Behind 'Can you drink the water?' and the beck-water dataset page.
Fields: dissolved lead, dissolved cadmium, dissolved zinc, dissolved copper, nearest route, mine association.
Lake District National Park Authority car park payments, by hour
Paid transactions at the Authority's pay-and-display car parks by car park, month and hour of day, from what it released under FOI/2026.500: its RingGo phone-payment extract as released, and our hourly aggregation of the machine and RingGo payments. The aggregation is our analysis of the Authority's data, not the Authority's.
Credit, word for word: Contains public sector information provided by the Lake District National Park Authority and licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. The Authority granted republication as open data on 1 October 2026, under the Open Government Licence v3.0; every file carries that credit in its first line. Please keep it with any copy, and credit hikes.guide for the aggregation.
- ldnpa-ringgo-zone-month-hour.csv — RingGo sessions by zone, month and hour, as released (10,944 rows, 315 KB). The Authority’s data as released, in CSV form.
- ldnpa-car-park-hourly-joined.csv — Transactions by car park, source, month and hour (joined) (16,488 rows, 723 KB). Our aggregation.
- ldnpa-car-park-hourly.csv — Machine transactions by car park and hour (456 rows, 12 KB). Our aggregation.
- ldnpa-ringgo-zone-hourly.csv — RingGo sessions by zone and hour (456 rows, 9 KB). Our aggregation.
Before you use a number: A transaction is a paid ticket or a phone session, not a car and not a visitor. Permit holders and anyone who did not pay are not in it, and one stay can buy more than one ticket. So every count is a floor on paid use, never a count of cars, people or spaces. The pay-and-display machine series starts in August 2024: the Authority confirmed nothing earlier can be recovered. The RingGo series runs from April 2024 to March 2026. The RingGo zone key (which zone code is which car park) came from the Authority on 4 September 2026; the Authority confirmed Hawkshead 37317, Beech Hill 37302 and New Dungeon Ghyll 37308 on 14 September 2026. Hour of day for the machines is the time the ticket was bought at the machine (Flowbird 'Terminal Date'), not the time the machine reported it.
Fields: car park, source (machine or RingGo), month, hour of day, transactions, RingGo zone.
How to credit
Please credit hikes.guide with a link back to this page (the paste-ready credit, four short blurbs and the chart embed codes are on the cite page). Where a dataset is built on Crown or third-party data (for example the Met Office climate series, under the Open Government Licence), that source is named on the data sources page — please honour its licence too. The car park payment files carry the Lake District National Park Authority’s own credit line, which travels with them word for word.