The Lake District in relief
Most maps of the Lake District tell you where things are. This one shows you what the ground does — where it rises, which way it falls, and why the valleys run as they do. Every stroke is cast from a terrain model rather than drawn by eye.
The map
Each stroke points downhill; heavier, longer and closer strokes mean steeper ground.The ground lit by a sun from the north-west (azimuth 315°), 45° above the horizon, with no vertical exaggeration.The gradient of the ground as a percentage: 100% rises one metre for every metre across.Height of the ground in 100 m bands, from GLO-30 elevation at each 62 m pixel.Lines of equal height every 50 m, the heavier line every 250 m, from GLO-30 elevation lightly smoothed and traced on a grid of about 31 m.
- Wainwright
- Above 900 m
All 214 Wainwrights at the summit positions and heights our fell pages publish. Tap a dot for its name and height.
The 214 Wainwrights as a list
- Pass
The four passes that have a page of their own, at the positions those pages publish.
The passes as a list
- Where a walk starts
Where 62 of our route guides start; walks that start within a few hundred metres of each other share a mark. Routes still marked planned are left off.
The 62 walks as a list
Tap the map where the line starts, then where it ends.
With a keyboard: choose an end, then the arrow keys move it about 620 m; hold Shift for five times that.
The profile samples a precomputed grid of heights about 125 m across, so short steep features are smoothed. It is the ground along a straight line, not a route, and not for navigation.
gentlesteep
Drawn from Copernicus GLO-30 slope and aspect, sampled about every 320 m across the whole park.
turned awayfacing the light
Shading is worked out at GLO-30’s native cell of about 30 m and averaged to the 62 m pixel. Darker means turned away from that light, not lower.
- under 15%
- 15–25%
- 25–35%
- over 35%
Worked out at GLO-30’s native cell of about 30 m and averaged to the 62 m pixel. The bands are 15, 25 and 35%, the same thresholds as our route steepness rating. It is the slope of the terrain, not of a path: a path can zig-zag across steep ground.
0 m1,000 m
Lowest cell 0 m, highest cell 974 m.
The lowest and highest cells are the minimum and maximum of all 2,831,779 GLO-30 cells whose centres fall inside the park outline. A cell holds one height for about 30 m of ground, so the model’s highest cell need not match a surveyed summit height.
- every 50 m
- every 250 m
They are unlabelled and far coarser than a walking map’s.
What relief means
Relief is the way the height of the land changes from one place to the next: how far it is from valley floor to summit, and whether the ground in between is steep or gentle, a ridge or a hollow. It belongs to an area, not to a point. Three simpler measures sit inside it. Elevation is the height of one spot above sea level; Scafell Pike's is 978 m. Gradient is how sharply the ground rises or falls, which this site gives as a percentage and bands at 15, 25 and 35%. Aspect is the compass direction a slope faces. A relief map sets out to show that shape on a flat page. A topographic map, such as an Ordnance Survey walking map, usually shows the same shape with contours and adds the paths, walls and buildings that this one leaves out.
Three ways to draw a hill
Each view answers a different question. Hachures are strokes laid down the line of fall, heavier where it is steeper: the shape reads at a glance, but no height can be read from them. Contours join points of equal height, so a height can be read exactly and steepness shows in their spacing, closer lines meaning steeper ground, but it takes practice to see a hill in them. Hillshade lights the model from one direction, here the north-west, so it looks most like the land itself, but its light and dark say which way the ground faces that light, not how high it is. Elevation and Slope are measurements rather than drawings: one bands height, the other gradient. Ordnance Survey's coloured one-inch map of 1920 printed hachures in brown and contours in red, and the OS notes that the hachures bring out the ground but make other detail harder to see.
Why the Lake District looks like a wheel
Seen whole, the Lake District's valleys run outwards from the middle like the spokes of a wheel. Wordsworth used the picture in his Guide to the Lakes, imagining himself on a cloud between Great Gable and Scafell with at least eight valleys spreading out beneath him; the National Park Authority puts the hub roughly at Dunmail Raise, north of Grasmere. The British Geological Survey explains the pattern in two stages. From about 65 million years ago the district was lifted and gently domed, and rivers set their courses outwards off the dome. Then, through several glaciations, ice caps sat over the centre and sent glaciers down those same valleys, widening, straightening and deepening them and in places breaking through the ridges between. Long lakes now fill several of the deepened troughs.
How the ice shaped it
Glaciers reshaped the valleys the rivers had cut. A valley that carried a glacier was left U-shaped, with steep sides and a broad floor; the British Geological Survey names Wasdale, Eskdale and Great Langdale as examples. Higher up, small glaciers sat in hollows on the fellsides and scooped them into corries, which Lakeland calls coves, and several now hold a tarn, among them Stickle Tarn, Levers Water and Goat's Water. Where corries bit into a ridge from both sides, what was left between them is an arête, and the BGS picks out Helvellyn's corries and arêtes as typical of the central fells. A side valley whose ice did less work was left as a hanging valley, its floor high above the deepened main one, often with a waterfall at the lip. The last small glaciers sat mostly on the north-east sides of summits and ridges.
Wasdale in relief
Wasdale puts most of this page into one valley. The British Geological Survey gives it as an example of a U-shaped valley, and Wast Water, in its floor, is England's deepest lake according to the National Park Authority. Along the lake's south-east shore the Screes run down from Illgill Head (609 m) and Whin Rigg (537 m) to the water; the BGS thinks they began to gather as the glaciers withdrew, and says they are still growing. At the head of the valley the ground climbs to Yewbarrow (629 m), Kirk Fell (802 m), Great Gable (899 m), Lingmell (807 m) and Scafell Pike (978 m). Switch to Slope and the fall from Illgill Head to the lake shows as the steepest band almost all the way down; draw a cross-section across the lake to see the trough in profile.
The Lake District, measured
We measured the whole National Park from the same elevation model the map is drawn from: 2.8 million cells about 30 m across, each weighted by the ground it covers.
- 36.9%of the National Park lies above 300 m
- 5.8%above 600 m
- 0.4%above 800 m
- 236 mhalf the park lies below this height
- 19.7%is steeper than 35%, the site’s steepest band
- 47.9%is gentler than 15%
The lowest cell is at sea level on the coast and the highest, 974 m, is the summit of Scafell Pike, whose surveyed height is 978 m: a 30 m cell averages the top. Steep ground, 15% or more, faces west slightly more often than any other way: 28.9% west, 26.4% east, 23.3% south, 21.4% north.
Two things these numbers are not. The model is a surface model, so woodland edges and buildings add steepness that is not ground. And terrain steepness is not route steepness: a path zig-zags across ground it would never climb straight.
How it is drawn
- The hachures are computed, not styled. Each stroke follows the downslope direction at that point, and its weight, length and spacing follow the gradient, sampled from the Copernicus GLO-30 elevation model across the whole National Park — not per massif. Steep ground is dense and dark; gentle ground is open.
- The boundary and the seventeen lakes are real outlines, from OpenStreetMap under the Open Database Licence — the same shapes our drinking-water page publishes, so the two agree.
- The sixteen settlements come from the front matter of our own place pages, the same coordinates those pages publish as structured data, cross-checked against Wikidata. Their labels are placed rather than offset: each tries sixteen positions and takes the first that clears every name already on the plate.
- The other four views — hillshade, slope, elevation and contours — come from the same terrain model, computed once and drawn on the same grid as the hachures, so the lakes, boundary and settlements sit over each of them in the same place.
- The Wainwrights, passes and walk starts you can switch on are placed from the coordinates their own pages publish, through the same projection as the plate, and each mark links to its page.
What we don’t claim
- This is not a navigation map. No survey contours (the Contours view is drawn from the elevation model), no grid, no paths, no rights of way. It will not get you off a hill. Take OS Explorer OL4–OL7 and a compass for that.
- Hachures show slope, not height. A dense patch means steep, not high. For height, the fells map colours all 544 tops by altitude.
- It is one drawing at one scale. Detail below roughly a kilometre is not resolved and should not be read into it.
The other maps we hold are on the maps page — which fells a bus reaches, what every car park costs, where the right to roam applies, and all 544 tops by height.