How we grade and time our routes
Before you go
Every route page grades the walk on five separate axes and gives a time to each top. This page says how both are worked out, which parts are measured and which are judged, and why the times run on the slow side on purpose.
Five grades, not one
One word for a whole walk hides the thing you need to know. A short walk can have one brutal pull; a long one can be easy underfoot all day. So each route is graded on five axes, each on the same four-word scale, Easy, Moderate, Hard or Severe, and each with a one-line note saying why. When a route sits between two bands it takes the harder one: rounding up is the cautious error.
| Axis | What it describes | How it is set |
|---|---|---|
| Length | How long a day it is | Measured from the track |
| Steepness | The hardest sustained climb or descent | Measured from the track |
| Terrain | What is underfoot: path, bog, rough ground | Judged |
| Navigation | How easily you could go wrong, above all in cloud | Judged |
| Exposure | Steep drops and scrambling you cannot avoid | Judged |
The two measured grades
Length is the distance of the recorded track.
| Band | Distance |
|---|---|
| Easy | under 8 km |
| Moderate | 8–14 km |
| Hard | 14–20 km |
| Severe | over 20 km |
Steepness is the steepest stretch of 500 m anywhere on the track, not the average. An average hides a walk that does all its climbing in one go, and that one pull is what decides how the day feels.
| Band | Steepest 500 m |
|---|---|
| Easy | under 15% |
| Moderate | 15–25% |
| Hard | 25–35% |
| Severe | over 35% |
The elevation profile on each route page is shaded with the same thresholds, so the chart is the evidence for the steepness grade: the darkest stretch on it is the one the grade describes.
The three judged grades
Terrain, navigation and exposure cannot be measured from a track, so they are judged, and each route page says how:
- Set on the ground: Lee has walked the line and graded it from what he found, labelled “Hard – graded by Lee on the ground” (on a walk he walked in part, “on the stretches he walked”).
- Our judgement: graded from the map and the route’s record, labelled “Hard – our judgement from the map and the route’s record; not walked yet”, or “that stretch not walked” where it covers a stretch of a walk Lee walked in part.
- A map estimate: estimated from maps and OpenStreetMap, labelled “Hard – estimated from the map, not checked on the ground”.
Two of those are never counted as a grade, because the evidence cannot carry one. Exposure from the map says “Not assessed on the ground; the map suggests Hard”, with the map’s band shown and left out of the overall grade: a knife-edge ridge and a steep grass slope look the same in elevation data, and a confident wrong band is worse than none. That is the case on 145 of the 227 routes we publish. Terrain from the map says “Not assessed” where the map holds nothing about the ground, on 127 routes.
Effort and navigation are graded apart because they need not agree: a walk can be long and steep on a path you could follow in the dark. Lake District walks by effort and navigation puts the two side by side for every route we publish, in bands, with how each navigation grade was set.
How the times are worked out
The times use Naismith’s rule, the walker’s standard: an hour for every 5 km on the flat, plus an hour for every 600 m of climbing. That gives the fast end of each range. The steady end is the same time multiplied by 1.33. Each route page shows the range to every top and to the finish, never a single figure.
Why the times run slow, on purpose
We checked Naismith against 41 of Lee’s own recorded Lakeland hill walks, April 2023 to July 2026: walks of at least 250 m of climbing and 4 km, starting inside the National Park, measured along the same elevation model the site uses. The pace that fits them is 5.34 km/h on the flat and 674 m of climbing an hour.
Against that pace, the times on our route pages are longer on every route: by 8.5% on a typical route, between 7% and 9.6% across all 227, and by at most 40 minutes on the longest day. We have left them that way. A time that runs long leaves you with daylight to spare; one that runs short can leave you on the hill in the dark. And a model fitted to one walker is not a better guess for you than the textbook rule.
Two limits, said plainly. The fitted pace is one person’s moving time: it does not include stops. Counting stops, those walks took 1.25 times their moving time on average (the median was 1.15), so an hour on the move became about an hour and a quarter; and stops are not predictable from distance and climb. And it is still a guide: breaks, weather, rough ground and the slowest person in your party all add to it.
What a grade is not
A grade describes the line on a fair day in summer. It is not a forecast and not a verdict on whether you should go. Conditions change what any walk asks of you, so every route page sends you to the live conditions and the mountain forecasts before you set off. Navigate for yourself and carry a map and compass.
Questions
Why five grades instead of one?
Because a walk can be short and steep, or long and easy underfoot, and one word hides which. Each axis gets its own band and a one-line note saying why.
What does it mean when a band sits between two?
It takes the harder one. Rounding up is the cautious error.
Why does exposure say “Not assessed” on some routes?
Because exposure cannot be read from elevation data: a knife-edge ridge and a steep grass slope look the same in it. Where nobody has judged the drops, the page says so and shows the band the map suggests, which never counts towards the overall grade. On 145 of the 227 routes we publish, exposure says Not assessed on the ground.
Are the walking times for me?
They are textbook times, the same for every reader. On our own recorded walks they run about 8.5% slow, on purpose. Breaks, weather, rough ground and the slowest person in your party all add to them.
Does a grade change in winter?
The grades describe the summer line. Under snow and ice a route is a different route with different hazards, and where we know whether a line has been walked in winter conditions, the route page says so.
Where the numbers come from
The bands and the pace constants: the same code that grades and times every route, read when this page is built. The route figures: the 227 published routes’ own records, computed on 24 October 2026. The 41 recorded walks and the stop allowance: our calibration of Naismith against Lee’s Strava history, written up on 27 July 2026; the walks themselves are not published.