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Summer on the Fells: what actually hurts people

By Lee McCoy — every figure dated and sourced; the full evidence base, including what we could not evidence, is downloadable below · Updated 12 July 2026

What actually puts people on a stretcher

Ask a walker what frightens them about a summer day in the Lakes and you’ll hear about adders on the path, lightning on the ridge, something in the water.

Now look at what mountain rescue teams actually get called to.

And what was behind them (contributory factors, same year, MREW Annual Review 2026 (opens in new tab)):

Not one animal. Not one plant. No lightning. The things that put people on a stretcher are slipping over, getting lost, and misjudging the day.

So what does kill people?

This is where you have to be careful, because the honest answer comes from several different counting systems and they are not interchangeable. We’ve set them side by side as separate facts — not as a league table, because dividing one by another would be meaningless.

First: the animal figures are national and count every setting — homes, gardens, workplaces, roadsides. They are not fell-walking figures. Whatever the risk is on a hill, it is some fraction of these already-small numbers.

Second: look at the top row. About twenty-one people a year die in the Lake District fells — and they die of a slip, a wrong turn, a day that ran out of light, a heart that gave out on a climb. That row is counted differently from every other row in the table, so we won’t divide one by another. We’ll just say the plain thing: the danger on a fell is the fell.

And if you want the comparison stripped of every caveat — same country, same years, same death registers — a doctor did it fifty years ago (Reid, BMJ 1976 (opens in new tab)):

In England and Wales between 1950 and 1972, one person died of an adder bite. Sixty-one died of bee or wasp stings. — H. A. Reid, Adder bites in Britain, British Medical Journal, 1976

The fear is pointed in the wrong direction. Here’s where it should be pointing.

1. Heat

Heat is the summer hazard people most readily wave off — and it is a real one. Mountain rescue teams are called out to walkers with heat exhaustion on warm, still days, usually people who set off underestimating what the sun and a steady climb do to them. It is not hypothetical, and the line between managing it and calling for help is a clear one.

The two stages, and the thirty-minute rule

Most articles blur heat exhaustion and heatstroke together. The NHS doesn’t, and the distinction is the whole thing (NHS (opens in new tab)).

Heat exhaustion, per the NHS, looks like: tiredness; dizziness; headache; feeling sick or being sick; excessive sweating with pale, clammy skin (a change in skin colour can be harder to see on brown or black skin); cramps in the arms, legs and stomach; a high temperature; being very thirsty; feeling irritable. The NHS says it “does not usually need emergency medical help if you can cool down within 30 minutes.”

The NHS’s four steps: move them somewhere cool; take off unnecessary clothing; give them plenty of water (an isotonic sports drink or oral rehydration powder also helps replace the salt lost in sweat); and cool the skin — spray or sponge with cool water and fan them, with cold packs wrapped in cloth under the armpits or on the neck. Stay with them. They should feel better within 30 minutes.

The one nobody talks about: drinking too much

There is a way to make yourself dangerously ill on a hot fell by doing what everyone tells you to do.

Exercise-associated hyponatraemia is what happens when you drink more fluid than you’re losing, over hours, and the sodium in your blood falls too low. The international consensus on it is blunt about the cause: “sustained, excessive fluid intake in volumes greater than loss” (2015 EAH consensus (opens in new tab)).

Three things worth knowing, all from that consensus:

• Sports drinks do not protect you. They’re all hypotonic — weaker than your blood — so drinking enough of them to cause the problem overwhelms the sodium they contain.
• The tell is weight. Almost every symptomatic case has occurred in someone who gained or maintained weight during the activity, when they should have lost a little.
• It’s the slow ones, not the fast ones. Smaller people, going at a gentler pace, drinking more than they sweat.

Which is why the guidance settled on the simplest possible rule: drink to thirst. The consensus is pointed about the alternative — advice to drink before you’re thirsty, it says, “has fostered the misconception that thirst is a poor guide… and has facilitated inadvertent overdrinking.”

An honest gap: we don’t know how common this is among British hillwalkers, because nobody has counted. The UK evidence comes from the London Marathon. We’re telling you the mechanism, not a risk.

Heat kills in Britain — but not, mostly, on the fells

In the summer of 2025, UKHSA estimated 1,504 heat-associated deaths in England (95% confidence interval 936–2,072 — these are modelled figures, not a body count) (UKHSA (opens in new tab)). It’s worth knowing. But we won’t pretend it’s about you on a ridge: mortality was heavily concentrated in the 85-and-over age group, and UKHSA found no statistically significant heat mortality in the North West at all. It is a story about frail people indoors in southern England, not walkers on Skiddaw. We’d rather say that than borrow a big number we haven’t earned.

What ~850 m does to a July afternoon, though, is real and measured:

Observed July daytime hours (09:00–17:00) at Great Dun Fell, 847 m, 2014–2023 (Met Office MIDAS Open via CEDA (opens in new tab)). A North Pennine summit — a regional, altitude-based reading of what ~850 m does to a July afternoon, never a per-fell figure. Feels-like is computed (JAG/TI), not observed. The full valley-vs-summit pairing lives in Bad Weather Hiking — we don’t re-treat it here.

Dogs: the section that might actually save something

This is the part of the piece we’d most like you to read.

Everyone knows about dogs in hot cars. Almost nobody knows this: in a study of 905,543 dogs across 886 UK vet practices, among heat-related illness cases where a trigger was recorded, 74% were triggered by exertion. Hot cars accounted for 5% (RVC VetCompass (opens in new tab)).

It gets more pointed. Of those exertion-triggered cases where the type of exercise was known, 68% happened after a walk — not a run, not agility, not a dog sprinting after a ball. A walk.

And the temperature it happens at: the median ambient temperature on days when dogs presented with heat illness was 16.9 °C (VetCompass, Vet Sci 9(5):231 (opens in new tab)).

Sixteen degrees. That’s not a heatwave. That’s an ordinary, pleasant Lakeland summer afternoon — the sort of day you’d throw the lead in the boot without a second thought.

Across all dogs brought to a vet with heat-related illness, around one in seven died (14%, 95% CI 11–18%). That is a separate figure, drawn from a differently-defined set of cases — not the death rate of walk-triggered ones.

Flat-faced breeds — bulldogs, French bulldogs, chow chows — carry about twice the odds of heat-related illness (odds ratio 2.10) compared with longer-muzzled dogs. But this is not only a brachycephalic problem: it is an exercise problem, and the dog most at risk is a young, fit, willing one on a warm walk who won’t stop because you haven’t.

What to do: walk early or late, not in the middle of the day. Carry water for the dog and offer it often. The RSPCA’s warning signs are panting and noisy breathing, thick or sticky drooling, red gums and tongue, weakness, lethargy, confusion or disorientation, vomiting, muscle spasms, collapse and seizures. Stop at the first of them (RSPCA (opens in new tab)).

And two pieces of RSPCA advice that run against what most people do:

• Cool the dog first, then travel — not the other way round.
• Do not drape wet towels over the dog. The RSPCA is explicit that this traps heat and makes things worse. Under the dog, not over it. And it adds, against the common fear: “cold water rarely causes shock in over-heating dogs — dousing or immersing the over-heated dog in cold water is vital to their recovery.”

If it doesn’t improve fast, that’s a vet, urgently.

And on hot rock: the mechanism is real — bare rock and stone paths in full sun get far hotter than the air, and paws burn. But we’re not going to give you a number, because there isn’t a British one. The circulating “air 25°C means tarmac 52°C” tables are American, come from blogs, and carry no date or source. Use the test that needs no data at all: put the back of your hand on the ground. If you can’t hold it there comfortably, don’t walk your dog on it.

2. Water

Cold water shock: why strong swimmers drown in July

A lake that looks inviting on a hot day is a different thing to your body than it is to your eyes.

The killer is not hypothermia. Professor Mike Tipton’s group at Portsmouth are explicit: “even in ice-cold water, the possibility of hypothermia does not arise for at least 30 minutes in adults” (Tipton et al., 2017 (opens in new tab)). You do not have a cold problem. You have a breathing problem, and you have it immediately.

Hitting cold water triggers a gasp, then uncontrollable hyperventilation. If your face is under when you gasp, you inhale water. That’s the whole mechanism, and it takes seconds. Being a strong swimmer is irrelevant — you cannot out-swim a reflex.

The temperature that does it is the temperature our lakes actually are. The response begins in water as warm as 25 °C, and the breathing response peaks between 15 °C and 10 °C — precisely the range of British inland water through the summer. The RNLI defines anything below 15 °C as cold water (RNLI (opens in new tab)). Air temperature tells you nothing about it.

There may be a second mechanism. Cold receptors fire your sympathetic nervous system while cold water on your face fires the opposing “diving response” — two halves of the nervous system pulling against each other at once. Shattock and Tipton have proposed that this autonomic conflict can provoke a dangerous heart rhythm, even in young, healthy people. It is a hypothesis, not a settled fact, and we’ll flag it as one.

Who is actually drowning

In 2025 the National Water Safety Forum recorded at least 202 accidental water-related deaths in the UK (NWSF WAID (opens in new tab)). That figure is provisional and will rise — a further 201 cases are still with coroners.

The bits that matter for walkers:

• 57% happened at inland water — rivers, lakes, reservoirs, quarries. Inland has outnumbered coastal every year since 2019.
• 32% of accidental deaths happened during everyday activities — walking, running, cycling. As the NWSF puts it, many of these people were never intending to enter the water at all.
• August is the deadliest month. June and July are close behind.
• 85% were male.

That third of deaths — people who slipped, or waded in for a moment, or went in after a dog — is the one a walking site should sit with. You do not have to be swimming to drown.

Blue-green algae, and a rating that doesn’t mean what you think

Blue-green algae blooms in warm, still water through summer and into autumn. It can make people ill — rashes, eye irritation, vomiting, fever — and, in the words of the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, it “has caused the deaths of dogs, horses, cattle, birds and fish across the UK” (UKCEH (opens in new tab)).

The scum collects along the shore. Which is exactly where a hot dog goes.

Here is the thing almost nobody knows. Environment Agency bathing-water ratings test for E. coli and intestinal enterococci — and nothing else. They do not test for blue-green algae. A bathing water rated Excellent can be blooming, and the rating will not tell you.

If you’re unsure what you’re looking at, UKCEH’s own test: poke the scum with a stick. If it breaks into small particles or irregular clumps, it’s likely blue-green algae. Small round leaves are duckweed; hair-like strands are filamentous algae. Those are harmless — but the test is a rough field aid, not a diagnosis. If in doubt, keep the dog out.

We can’t tell you how many dogs it kills. Nobody counts. UKCEH says it happens most years. That’s as far as the evidence goes, so that’s as far as we’ll go.

Drinking from a beck

Every walker has done it and the water was fine.

We can’t give you a risk figure, because there isn’t one — no British study has measured the pathogen load of upland streams against the grazing above them, and UKHSA doesn’t even have a category for “drank from a stream while walking.” Anyone who quotes you a percentage here is making it up.

What we can tell you is the mechanism, and it’s the useful part. The bug to think about is Cryptosporidium parvum, and it is a livestock organism — carried by lambs and calves. UKHSA’s outbreak data bears this out with brutal consistency: in 2024, three-quarters of cryptosporidium outbreaks were linked to lambing events and open farms (UKHSA (opens in new tab)).

So the variable isn’t altitude, and it isn’t how clear the water looks. It’s what’s grazing upstream of you. A beck running off a bare crag with nothing above it is a very different proposition from one draining a sheep pasture — and most Lakeland becks have sheep somewhere above them. There’s no specific treatment for cryptosporidium, and a healthy adult usually recovers in a week or two. But that isn’t true for everyone: see a doctor if you can’t keep fluids down, if it drags on, or if you or your child are immunocompromised, when it can be far more serious (NHS).

Jumping in

We looked hard for a British figure on tombstoning deaths and the one everyone quotes — 20 deaths, 70 serious injuries — turns out to be untraceable, and is published by different official bodies with two different time periods attached. We won’t repeat a number we can’t stand behind.

The mechanisms are solid enough on their own: you cannot see submerged rock; water depth changes; and you land in cold water, which means the gasp reflex fires at the exact moment you’re underwater. That last one is why this is a cold-water-shock story, not a diving story.

3. Lightning: the rule nobody knows

11 July 2026. Coming down off Robinson, I heard thunder rumbling round the head of the valley. By the time I reached the foot of Catbells the cloud had come over — and there were still people walking up it.

I don’t blame them. Catbells is 451 metres. It’s the friendliest fell in the Lakes, the one you take visitors up. It doesn’t feel like a mountain, so it doesn’t feel like the kind of place lightning happens.

That instinct is the problem, and the data is unusually clear about why.

First, the honest part: this will almost certainly not kill you. Over thirty years, lightning killed ten people who were out walking on hills, mountains or cliff-tops in the entire United Kingdom (Elsom & Webb (opens in new tab)). Ten, in thirty years. We’re not going to dress that up as a menace.

But now the part that matters. In that same study, of the twenty leisure-walking lightning deaths, exactly half were not on hills at all. They happened at “lower elevations including parks, a canal bank and on the side of a Scottish loch.”

Because height is not what protects you. The researchers spell out the mechanism: the risk is greatest in “wide-open spaces… where a person may be the highest point around” — and they explicitly name low-lying places like golf courses and playing fields as prime ground for it.

On Catbells’ bare, open ridge, with nothing above you and nothing to draw a strike away, you are the highest point. A low fell offers no protection at all. The very thing that makes it a lovely fell — that open, unobstructed ridge — is the thing that makes it a bad place to be under a storm.

The paper is also quietly damning about why people carry on: “some people lead busy lives and are very reluctant to alter their plans.” You’ve driven two hours. You’ve got the day. The thunder sounds far off. And of those who did try to shelter, the researchers note that the shelter chosen “was often a bad choice, being a tree which was subsequently struck.”

So: the rule

• If you can hear thunder, you are already within range. That is not a figure of speech: Mountaineering Scotland’s guidance is that lightning can strike well away from the storm itself, so audible thunder means you are in it (Mountaineering Scotland (opens in new tab)). Thunder is not a warning that it’s coming. It’s a warning that it’s here.
• Get off the top, and off the ridge. Lose height. Move away from being the tallest thing around.
• Do not shelter under a crag, an overhang or a lone tree. A strike will jump the gap between the rock above you and the ground below — a side flash. This is the instinct that kills, because it’s the same instinct that keeps you dry.
• Do not lie down. A nearby strike spreads current through the ground; lying flat puts a big voltage difference between your head and your feet. Crouch, feet together, minimal contact with the ground, head down.
• Put your poles and ice axe down and move away from them.
• Spread the group out — so that a single strike can’t take everyone, and so that someone is left to give CPR.
• Wait it out. RoSPA endorses the “30/30” rule: shelter if the gap between flash and bang is 30 seconds or less, and stay put until 30 minutes after the last thunder (RoSPA (opens in new tab)). (Note: the Met Office gives compatible advice but doesn’t use the “30/30” name — we’d rather tell you who says what than pretend at a consensus.)

And the cheapest rule of all is the one you use before you leave the house: if thunderstorms are forecast, go somewhere else. We’ve written about when to cancel a walk — this is one of the easy calls.

4. Wildlife and plants

Cattle: the one that actually kills walkers

Around one or two members of the public are killed by cattle each year on public rights of way in Great Britain (HSE (opens in new tab)). That is the largest toll of any British animal on walkers — and almost nobody is frightened of a field of cows.

The pattern in the fatalities is strikingly consistent — and it is not “a bull went for someone.” (These figures come from an analysis of HSE fatality summaries published as a preprint, not yet peer-reviewed (medRxiv preprint (opens in new tab)); HSE’s own public statement of one to two deaths a year is what anchors the headline.)

• 84% of public deaths involved a dog being present. Walkers who died were vastly more likely than farmers to have had a dog with them.
• Members of the public were markedly more likely than farmers to be killed near a calf, or a cow that had recently calved.
• Trampling — not goring — was the mechanism in nearly three-quarters of cases.

The cow is not attacking you. She is driving off what she reads as a predator: your dog. And if the dog is on a lead, attached to you, she cannot separate the two.

So the official advice is the exact opposite of your instinct. From the Countryside Code (Countryside Code (opens in new tab)):

“Let your dog off the lead if you feel threatened by livestock or horses. Do not risk getting hurt protecting your dog. Releasing your dog will make it easier for you both to reach safety.”

Let it go. It is a horrible thing to ask of someone who loves their dog, and it is the official advice, and the fatality pattern is what it rests on: a dog on a lead ties the animal’s target to you.

The rest of it is ordinary sense: walk quietly round the edge, don’t get between a cow and her calf, and keep the dog on a lead near livestock the rest of the time. (On open access land, dogs must be on a short lead — no more than 2 metres — around livestock, and from 1 March to 31 July.)

Ticks and Lyme disease

Ticks sit in long grass, bracken and woodland edge and wait to be brushed against. UKHSA calls Lyme disease the most common vector-borne human infection in England and Wales, and cases peak in summer (UKHSA (opens in new tab)).

How many? Honestly, nobody currently publishes a straight answer. UKHSA’s last published count of laboratory-confirmed cases in England and Wales is 1,156, for 2021 — down from a peak of 1,639 in 2019. That surveillance page hasn’t been updated since April 2022; the newer UKHSA dashboard publishes England-only rates (1.69 per 100,000 in 2024) and no absolute count at all. UKHSA separately estimates a further 1,000–2,000 cases a year that are not laboratory-confirmed. So: certainly thousands, and we won’t pretend to a sharper figure than the surveillance supports.

An honest note on the Lakes: UKHSA does not list the Lake District among its high-risk areas — the NHS names southern England and the Scottish Highlands. Ticks are certainly here, and the habitat is right. But we’re not going to invent a regional risk figure to make the point land harder.

Checking and removing. Check yourself — and children, and the dog — at the end of a day in bracken. Behind knees, waistband, groin, armpits, hairline.

To remove one, NHS guidance: use fine-tipped tweezers or a tick tool, grip it as close to the skin as possible, and pull slowly upwards without squeezing or crushing it. Then clean the bite. Note what the NHS does not say: no burning it, no smothering it in Vaseline, no alcohol, no twisting (NHS (opens in new tab)).

What to watch for. The rash — erythema migrans — is the one that matters: an expanding red patch, sometimes with a clear centre, usually appearing one to four weeks after a bite but occasionally up to three months. It isn’t usually itchy or painful, which is exactly why it gets ignored. On brown or black skin it can look like a bruise.

This bit is worth knowing because it changes what you should expect at the surgery: NICE guidance says to diagnose and treat Lyme disease on the rash alone, without waiting for a blood test (NICE NG95 (opens in new tab)) — and it does not require you to remember being bitten. Most people never notice the tick. If you have that rash, you should be getting antibiotics, not a test.

Adders

Britain’s only venomous snake, and its reputation is out of all proportion to its record: nobody has died of an adder bite in Britain since 1975 (Langham 2018, literature review (opens in new tab)).

Estimates of bites run to fifty or a hundred a year — but that is an expert estimate, not data, because no one in the UK actually counts them. We’ll say so rather than dress it up.

Adders want nothing to do with you. They bask on warm rocks and paths, they feel you coming, and they leave. Bites happen when they’re trodden on or picked up.

Dogs are bitten more often than people, because they investigate with their faces — nose and muzzle. And it’s a live risk, not a historical one: in July 2026 the Oakhill Veterinary Group in Windermere warned dog owners (opens in new tab) after several dogs were bitten, with adders reported at Loughrigg Fell, Scout Scar and around Staveley as the warm weather brought them out to bask. Keep a dog on the lead in long grass, bracken and woodland, where most bites happen when a dog treads on a basking snake. If your dog is bitten, call your vet at once and carry the dog to the car if you can — keeping it still slows the venom — because a bite an adult would shrug off can make a dog seriously ill; the treatment is antivenom.

Wasps and bees — the sting in the tail

Here’s the correction to the fear hierarchy, in one line: wasps and bees kill three or four people a year in England and Wales. Adders have killed nobody in fifty years.

That’s not a rhetorical flourish, it’s the death register. Over 2013–2024 there were 43 deaths from contact with hornets, wasps or bees (ONS, ICD-10 X23 (opens in new tab)); going back further, the ONS series records 74 across 2001–2022. Deaths are almost always anaphylaxis, and the risk is highest in people over sixty (Herrera et al. (opens in new tab)).

If someone with a known allergy is walking with you, know where their adrenaline auto-injector is — and know how it is used, because on a fell you are the nearest help there is.

Per Resuscitation Council UK and Anaphylaxis UK (Resuscitation Council UK (opens in new tab)): use the auto-injector immediately — don’t wait to see if it settles. Then call 999, ask for an ambulance, and say the word “anaphylaxis”, even if they seem to be improving. Lie them flat with their legs raised (if they’re struggling to breathe they may need to sit up, but do not stand them up). If there’s no improvement, a second auto-injector after 5–15 minutes.

Giant hogweed

Sap containing furanocoumarins, which strip your skin’s protection against sunlight; the result is severe burns and blistering that can scar and recur for years (GOV.UK (opens in new tab)). Wash it off immediately, keep the skin out of the sun, and get medical advice.

But be clear where it lives: riverbanks and damp lowland ground. This is a valley and river-path hazard — the Derwent, the Eden, the Kent — not something you’ll meet on a ridge. We’d rather tell you where it isn’t than have you scanning for it on Scafell.

Midges

Not dangerous. Just miserable. Still, damp, sheltered, peaty evenings — the valley heads on a windless night.

There is no Lake District midge data. Scotland has forecasts; we don’t. We can tell you the conditions that produce them and nothing more precise than that, which is the honest position.

5. Fire

Britain’s wildfires are not started by the weather. They’re started by us.

The scale of it is startling: fire services have logged three wildfire ignitions caused by lightning — two of which were the same fire (POSTnote 717 (opens in new tab)). Around 40% are started deliberately; most of the remainder are accidents — barbecues, cigarettes, campfires that were “definitely out.” (Parliament’s own review notes that UK ignition data is incomplete and that fire investigators have not historically been trained in wildfire investigation, so treat the split as indicative.)

Fires spike in hot, dry years — 2022 and 2025 were the two worst on record, and the two hottest and driest. But note what we’re not saying: wildfire numbers are volatile, not steadily rising. They fell back sharply in 2023 and 2024. Wildfire counts track fire weather — and fire weather is what’s changing, as our Climate Report sets out.

On disposable barbecues, we’re going to be honest with you about the evidence. There is no published UK statistic attributing a share of wildfires to them. Not in the Home Office data, not the Forestry Commission’s, not Parliament’s own review. Plenty of articles will give you a percentage; they can’t source it. What exists is every fire service, national park and landowner in the country asking you not to use them on open ground — and individual fires, including in the Lake District, attributed to them by the crews who put them out.

And the legal position, precisely — because most articles get this wrong. There is no single Lake District byelaw banning barbecues. What there is, is better:

Under the Countryside and Rights of Way Act, your right to be on open access land — which is most of the open fell — does not apply to anyone who “lights or tends a fire, or does any act which is likely to cause a fire” (CRoW Act 2000, Sch. 2 (opens in new tab)). The moment you light a barbecue on the fell, you stop being a walker exercising a right and become a trespasser. And if the fire spreads, police have made clear it can be investigated as arson.

And in some places it is a straightforward criminal offence — which is worth saying, because most articles either miss this or get it wrong in the other direction.

The Lake District’s Access Land Byelaws, made in 1980, include one headed simply Fires (LDNPA Access Land Byelaws 1980 (opens in new tab)):

“No person shall, so as to be likely to cause damage by fire to anything on the land, light any fire or stove or place or throw or let fall any lighted match or any substance or thing in among or near to grass, fern, heather, bushes or trees on the land.”

Note “fire or stove” — a camping stove is caught by it too.

Those byelaws do not cover the whole National Park; they apply to thirty areas listed in their Schedule. But those thirty areas are not the obscure corners you might assume. They include Glenridding Common — all 1,080 hectares of it, expressly including Greenside, Brown Cove, Keppel Cove and both Striding Edge and Swirral Edge — the 4,555 hectares of Caldbeck and Uldale Commons north of Skiddaw Forest, Torver Commons, Blawith Fell, Stickle Tarn, Barf, Bassenthwaite Lake, the Windermere islands, and Gowbarrow above Ullswater.

So: light a stove on Striding Edge in dry heather and you are not merely being told off by a website. (The same byelaws prohibit camping on that land, incidentally.)

Everywhere else on open access land, the CRoW point above does the work: you forfeit your right to be there. And a fire that spreads can amount to arson or criminal damage.

Take a picnic. Peat burns underground for weeks.

Before you go

Quick answers

Method & honesty. Every figure on this page carries a date and a source; our full evidence base, including what we could not evidence, is published as ⇩ a downloadable dataset (CSV). Where the evidence doesn’t exist — the risk of drinking from a beck, how many dogs blue-green algae kills, how many wildfires disposable barbecues start — we have said so rather than guess. We are not doctors. Symptom descriptions and first-aid guidance here are drawn from the NHS, NICE, Resuscitation Council UK, Anaphylaxis UK, the RNLI and the Countryside Code, and attributed to them. Compiled 12 July 2026.

Sources

1. Mountain Rescue England & Wales — MREW Annual Review (incident statistics) (opens in new tab)
2. hikes.guide — Lake District Mountain Rescue Data Report (opens in new tab)
3. NHS — NHS — heat exhaustion and heatstroke (opens in new tab)
4. Clinical Journal of Sport Medicine — Hew-Butler et al. — 3rd International Exercise-Associated Hyponatremia Consensus (2015) (opens in new tab)
5. UK Health Security Agency — UKHSA — heat mortality monitoring, summer 2025 (opens in new tab)
6. RVC VetCompass — Hall, Carter & O'Neill — canine heat-related illness triggers (Animals 10(8):1324) (opens in new tab)
7. RVC VetCompass — Hall et al. — ambient temperature and canine heat-related illness (Vet Sci 9(5):231) (opens in new tab)
8. RSPCA — RSPCA — dogs and heatstroke (opens in new tab)
9. Experimental Physiology — Tipton et al. — cold water immersion: kill or cure? (2017) (opens in new tab)
10. RNLI — RNLI — cold water shock and Float to Live (opens in new tab)
11. National Water Safety Forum — NWSF — Water Incident Database (WAID) annual report, 2025 (opens in new tab)
12. UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology — UKCEH — Bloomin' Algae (live bloom map + app) (opens in new tab)
13. UK Health Security Agency — UKHSA — cryptosporidium surveillance and outbreaks (opens in new tab)
14. TORRO / Weather (RMetS) — Elsom & Webb — deaths and injuries from lightning in the UK (opens in new tab)
15. Mountaineering Scotland — Mountaineering Scotland — lightning safety in the mountains (opens in new tab)
16. RoSPA — RoSPA — lightning safety (the 30/30 rule) (opens in new tab)
17. Health and Safety Executive — HSE — cattle and public access (opens in new tab)
18. medRxiv (preprint) — Analysis of HSE livestock-fatality summaries, 2010/11–2022/23 (not yet peer-reviewed) (opens in new tab)
19. Natural England / Defra — The Countryside Code — advice for visiting the countryside with dogs (opens in new tab)
20. UK Health Security Agency — UKHSA — Lyme disease epidemiology and surveillance (opens in new tab)
21. NICE — NICE guideline NG95 — Lyme disease (diagnose on erythema migrans without testing) (opens in new tab)
22. NHS — NHS — Lyme disease and tick removal (opens in new tab)
23. Surrey Amphibian & Reptile Group (Langham 2018) — Adder bite fatalities in Britain — literature review (opens in new tab)
24. NHS — NHS — snake bites: what to do (opens in new tab)
25. British Medical Journal — H. A. Reid — Adder bites in Britain (BMJ, 1976) (opens in new tab)
26. Biology 11(2):282 — Herrera et al. — hymenoptera sting mortality (WHO Mortality Database) (opens in new tab)
27. Resuscitation Council UK / Anaphylaxis UK — Emergency treatment of anaphylaxis (opens in new tab)
28. Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology — POSTnote 717 — Wildfire risk in the UK (Open Parliament Licence) (opens in new tab)
29. legislation.gov.uk — Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000, Schedule 2 — general restrictions (fires) (opens in new tab)
30. Lake District National Park Authority — Access Land Byelaws 1980 (incl. the Fires byelaw; Schedule of 30 areas) (opens in new tab)
31. NHS / GOV.UK — Giant hogweed — burns from furanocoumarin sap (opens in new tab)
32. Met Office / CEDA Archive — MIDAS Open — UK hourly weather observations (OGL v3.0) (opens in new tab)
33. Office for National Statistics — ONS — deaths from contact with hornets, wasps and bees (ICD-10 X23) (opens in new tab)