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The Most-Searched Wainwrights

How we decide a fell is worth our boots has changed twice over. The Victorians prized the challenge — the higher and harder the summit, the more it mattered. Wainwright changed that, teaching a generation to love the whole fell — the journey, the view, the character of the ground — and to judge a hill by its soul, not its height. Now the search box reveals a third era — we reward whichever fell photographs best from the nearest car park. Conquest, then connection, now content. Here’s the data behind the shift: which of the 214 people actually search for, set against how hard each really is and how the books remember them.

Part 1The ranking

UK average monthly searches, measured on the exact fell name(s). The clean top 15:

The concentration story: the ~188 cleanly-measurable fells share about 195,370 searches a month, but 67% of that goes to the top ten. Wainwright gave every one of the 214 a chapter of its own; the search box does not. And the long tail is invisible — 52 fells sit at the measurement floor (fewer than ~50 searches a month), grouped as “minimal” because below that the numbers are too coarse to rank.

Part 2 · the headlineFame vs danger — the divergence

Cross the search ranking with our own per-fell terrain-exposure rating and a gap opens up. This is the un-copyable bit — nobody else holds an exposure rating for all 214.

The honeypots — huge interest, gentle ground

The underrated — serious ground, almost no interest

28 high, exposed tops (our top two danger bands) get 100 searches a month or fewer — among them Long Side, Haycock, Dale Head, Watson's Dodd, Great Rigg, Mardale Ill Bell, Ill Bell, Hart Side, Seat Sandal, Allen Crags. These are proper mountain days on high, exposed ground, and the search box treats them as if they don’t exist. If you want the reward without the crowds, this is your list — check today’s conditions and go.

The one that breaks the pattern: Pavey Ark — the only genuine edge/scramble fell with real search interest (~1,900/mo), because Jack’s Rake is famous. Difficulty does draw searches — but only when it’s iconic.

Part 3The culture layer: fame authored by one man

The third axis is how often each fell appears in British books (Google Ngrams, 1900–2019) — fame in print vs fame in the search box. Wainwright published the seven Pictorial Guides book by book from 1955 to 1966, so each fell entered the canon at a different date — the Eastern Fells (Helvellyn) in 1955, the Western Fells (Haystacks) not until 1966. We measure each fell’s book-mentions against its own average before its own book appeared — its “Wainwright bump”.

The finding: Haystacks is the standout — the only fell whose literary fame Wainwright measurably created (obscure before him; his favourite; his sign-off). Against it, the classically-famous names — Helvellyn, Skiddaw, Great Gable — actually peaked before Wainwright and have drifted down in the books since. Their fame is inherited (Wordsworth’s Helvellyn, the Romantic Lakes); Haystacks’ is authored.

The one name-change we hoped to show — “Saddleback” giving way to “Blencathra” — we honestly can’t read from the books: “Saddleback” stays commoner right through the 2010s, because it’s an everyday word (pigs, roofs, other places). A neat reminder of this piece’s own caution — some names simply can’t be measured cleanly, so we don’t pretend otherwise.

Beyond Haystacks, the full 190-fell pull surfaces a cohort of lesser fells whose book-mentions also rose after Wainwright (baseline-reliable ones only — Seathwaite Fell ×2.17, Birks ×2.04, High Rigg ×1.75, Pike of Stickle ×1.58). Fells with near-zero pre-1966 mentions are excluded, because a tiny denominator inflates the ratio into an artefact.

House rule: book-mentions and search interest measure different things — shown as parallel panels, never one line. In absolute mentions Skiddaw and Helvellyn still dwarf Haystacks ~10×; it’s the trend, not the level, that tells the story.

Part 4The fells we honestly can’t measure

26 fells are set aside from the numeric ranking because their names mean other things and the search figure can’t be trusted — an honest finding in itself. Among them: Raven Crag, Dodd (Skiddaw), Harter Fell (Mardale), Harter Fell (Eskdale), High Pike (Caldbeck), Red Pike (Buttermere), High Pike (Scandale), Red Pike (Wasdale), Barf, Tarn Crag (Easedale), Tarn Crag (Sleddale), Lord's Seat, Pillar, Sail… (all shown in the table below, each with its reason). Fairfield is measured on the walking-specific “Fairfield Horseshoe” query (~2,600/mo) rather than the bare name — stripping out the noise from every other Fairfield in the country — so it sits honestly at #10 rather than inflated into the top three.

Instagram-famous, not walking-famous: Raven Crag (~8,350/mo) is the clearest case — its search interest is inflated far beyond its modest standing as a walk, because its Thirlmere viewpoint is a huge Instagram location (and several other Raven Crags share the name). A handful of fells are searched for the photograph, not the climb — where the fame comes from a phone, not a pair of boots.

The bigger pictureConquest, connection, content

Underneath the numbers is a story about us. Three times over, the Lakes have redefined what makes a fell famous — and each of our three measures catches one of them.

Conquest — fame you had to earn

Before Wainwright, a fell’s standing came from its summit: the high, serious objectives of the golden age of hillwalking. It’s why the classically-famous names — Helvellyn, Skiddaw, Scafell Pike, Great Gable — fill the old books, their mentions peaking in the 1930s and 1940s and drifting down ever since. Fame was altitude and effort; the reward was the top.

Connection — Wainwright’s quiet revolution

Then one man spent thirteen years hand-drawing all 214 and changed the terms. He didn’t rank fells by height or hardship — he judged them by character, and he didn’t hold back. He could be withering about the ones that bored him: Mungrisdale Common a grassy wilderness best avoided, The Nab a dull whaleback, Armboth Fell little better than a waste of time. But the fells with soul he loved without reserve — and his favourite was no giant. It was Haystacks, a modest 597-metre top he loved for its beauty and its company, where his ashes were scattered. It’s the one fell whose fame he measurably created. He made a fell’s worth about its soul, not its summit — the journey the reward.

Content — fame the whole family can reach

There’s an irony Wainwright would have enjoyed. In 1988, three years before he died, he published a book called Fellwalking with a Camera — his own love letter to photographing the hills he’d spent a lifetime drawing. The camera was in his hands too. What’s changed since isn’t the camera; it’s what we point it at, and how far we’re willing to walk to do it.

The search box shows Wainwright’s democracy widening further still. Today’s most-searched fells aren’t the highest or the hardest — they’re the easiest to reach and the best to photograph: Catbells above Derwentwater, Loughrigg from the middle of Ambleside, Helm Crag, Rannerdale Knotts. Gentle, near the road, camera-ready. There’s a superficial edge to it, and Raven Crag is the giveaway — a modest fell searched not for the climb but for the Instagram viewpoint you barely have to walk to.

But look again at that list. Loughrigg is where a family walks a fell together on a holiday; Catbells is a seven-year-old’s first summit and a grandparent’s last. Wainwright opened the fells to the ordinary walker — and now, phone in pocket, they’ve opened further, to the family who’d never have thought a Lakeland “mountain” was for them. Something is lost when the serious tops go unlooked-at; but something is gained when a child asks to climb Catbells because they saw a picture.

Conquest, connection, and now — at its best — company. The summit you earned, then the fell you knew, now the one you share. The search box isn’t the shallow end of walking — it’s the front door.

The dataAll 214, sortable

Every Wainwright, sortable by any column and filterable by region. The ambiguous names are tagged and shown by default — never silently dropped. Without JavaScript, the full table stays readable.

Sort by any column; filter by region; toggle the ambiguous names (shown by default, never dropped). The full dataset is a public CSV: wainwright-search-stats.csv.

MethodologyHow this was measured

• Search interest: UK average monthly searches, exact fell name(s), Google Keyword-Planner basis, pulled 6 July 2026. Spelling variants summed (e.g. “cat bells” + “catbells”); the 26 ambiguous names excluded and listed openly. A current-interest snapshot, not back-cast — time-series are used for shape only, never magnitude (Google Keyword Planner (opens in new tab)).
• A note on sources: these are Keyword-Planner-style exact-keyword volumes and are deliberately not reconciled to earlier modelled (Glimpse) anchors — the two measure different things; we use one consistent source and say so.
• Terrain danger: hikes.guide’s own per-fell exposure rating (sheltered / open / exposed / edge-scramble), editorial + heuristic — not an accident count. 212/214 rated (our exposure data (opens in new tab)).
• Book-mentions: Google Ngrams, British English 2019 corpus, 1900–2019; pre-1966 vs post-1966 mean. Bumps on fells with a near-zero pre-1966 baseline are excluded as artefacts (Google Ngrams (opens in new tab)).
• No fabricated numbers. The measurement floor and the ambiguous bucket are reported as findings, not hidden.

AnswersFrequently asked questions

Figures dated 6 July 2026 and re-checked when materially stale; terrain ratings corrected on request. This is data-journalism under our name — if a figure looks wrong, please tell us and we’ll fix it.