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.
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.
What we don’t claim
- This is not a navigation map. No contours, 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.