The path beneath your boots
The path you walked up today almost certainly didn’t just happen. Somebody built it — by hand, stone by stone. Stone pitching costs around £200 a metre, so a kilometre of hand-pitched fell path is £200,000. You’re walking on it, whether you know it or not.
Keeping the Lake District’s paths walkable costs about £500,000 a year — and it’s all charity-funded, most of it built and maintained by a small partnership called Fix the Fells (opens in new tab). This is the story of what’s under your boots, how to read it, and how to give a little back.
Why the fells need fixing
The Lake District is a World Heritage Site with something like 18 million visitors a year. On one path up Scafell Pike alone, Fix the Fells counts more than 100,000 people a year. Boots are heavy on soft ground: rain follows the compacted line, water cuts a channel, walkers step around the wet, and a footpath widens into a scar. Left alone, the damage runs away with itself — the worst historic scar, in Coledale near Keswick, reached up to 30 metres wide and 4 metres deep — wide enough to swallow a tennis court, deep enough to lose a bus in.
The point of the work isn’t to make the fells easier or safer — it’s to repair erosion sustainably, so the mountain heals and the ground beside the path can recover.
How to read a fell path
Once you know what to look for, a repaired path tells you how it was made. Tap the numbers to see what’s under — and beside — your boots.
Read the path
Tap a number on the drawing to see how that part is built.
A schematic, not to scale — a single path rarely shows every technique at once. Find a cross-drain on your next walk: once you’ve spotted one, you’ll see them everywhere.
How to walk kindly — and make their job easier
Every walker either adds to the erosion or helps hold it back, and it costs nothing to be on the right side:
- Walk through the puddle, not around it. Skirting the wet is exactly how a path doubles in width. Boots on the built line — even if it means wet feet.
- Don’t shortcut the zig-zags. Cutting the corner off a pitched zig-zag starts the next scar. The long way round is the kind way.
- Leave the drains and the stones be. Don’t dam a cross-drain into a paddling pool, and leave loose stones in the path — they’re not litter, they’re building material.
- Keep off the fragile edges and the reseeding ground beside a fresh repair — and don’t build cairns: a pulled-up stone is a stone off the mountain.
What it costs to keep the fells walkable
None of this is cheap, and almost none of it is publicly funded — Fix the Fells raises the money itself. Stone pitching runs at about £200 a metre; a full path build or repair can reach £400 a metre. Where the ground can’t be reached on foot, stone is flown in by helicopter, which alone costs roughly £60,000 a year. Here is a single recent year — 2025:
Behind the figures are people. In 2025, 147 volunteers gave 3,206 days — ordinary walkers who spend wet Saturdays levering stone into place, and who, as “lengthsmen”, patrol their own stretch of fell year-round to clear the drains before the water can do its damage. The rangers work the tops mainly from March to October; the volunteers never really stop.
One path, close up: Gowbarrow
The gentle path around Gowbarrow, above Ullswater
It looks effortless — which is the whole point. Fix the Fells has been repairing it since 2013: around 570 ranger-days and £114,000 over five years, plus 233 volunteer-days, and monthly visits to keep the drains running. Boggy, widening sections were rebuilt as buried aggregate paths, with stone pitching on the steeper pulls and little stone risers to ease the gradient — all to protect fragile ground where Grass of Parnassus, Cumbria’s county flower, still grows alongside bog asphodel and the ringlet butterfly.
Source: Fix the Fells — Gowbarrow (opens in new tab). See it on the Aira Force & Gowbarrow route.
Give a little back
So the next time a path steps you neatly up a steep pull, or carries you dry over a bog — now you know what it took, and what it’s worth: around £200 a metre, laid by hand, and kept going by a charity (Reg. 205846) and its volunteers. A few pounds genuinely helps keep the fells walkable and the mountainsides healing.
Donate to Fix the Fells → (opens in new tab)Path-repair figures and project detail are published by, and © Fix the Fells — a partnership of the National Trust and the Lake District National Park (Registered Charity 205846) — and are reproduced here as editorial provenance, with dates and links, not as our own claim. Figures verified 8 July 2026 against Fix the Fells’ FAQ (opens in new tab), 2025 Annual Report (opens in new tab) and path-repair techniques (opens in new tab) pages; network and cost figures differ between their pages and are cited to source. See also our data sources.