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What is a fell, and what are all these lists? A plain guide to the Lakeland fell rounds — the most hazardous summits, and all 214 Wainwrights.

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The fells

What is a fell?

A plain guide to the Lakeland fell rounds — what the word means, the most hazardous summits flagged from Mountain Rescue reports, and how the different fell lists differ. All 214 Wainwrights are here, with the way into the 116 Outlying Fells and the Birketts.

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A fell is high, open upland

A fell is an area of high, open, uncultivated upland — a mountain, hill or stretch of rough high moorland. The word comes from the Old Norse fjall / fell, meaning mountain: a legacy of the Norse settlers who farmed these valleys over a thousand years ago.

In the Lake District and the north of England, “the fells” are the mountains, and to “go on the fells” is to head up into the high country. There is no fixed height that makes a fell — what matters is the open, rugged, upland character of the ground.

And the other name people ask about is a person, not a trade. A wainwright built wagons, just as a wheelwright made wheels and a cartwright made carts — but these fells carry the name because of Alfred Wainwright, who wrote the seven Pictorial Guides to the Lakeland Fells between 1955 and 1966. So a fell is the ground itself, and a “Wainwright” is one of the 214 fells he chose to put in those books: one man’s judgement rather than a rule. That is what separates it from a Munro, which is any Scottish mountain over 3,000 feet — a measurement anyone can check, where Wainwright’s list is an opinion the rest of us inherited.

Jump to a list
WainwrightsOutlying FellsBirkettsFellrangersSyngesNuttallsMarilynsHuMPs

Browse all 214 Wainwrights

Every fell from Alfred Wainwright’s seven Pictorial Guides, sorted by how many bonus Birketts lie within 3 km — so the best-value tops for combined bagging rise to the top. Tick one off here and it shows as bagged on its own page too.

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Showing 24 of 214 fells
209 of these are also Birketts

Bonus Birketts are the extra tops within 3 km you can bag on the same walk. The full, crawlable list of all 214 lives on the Wainwrights page; bagging the lot? Start from the Wainwrights list and tick them off as you go.

Most hazardous fells

These are the fells our Mountain Rescue hazard pages flag as most serious — read the linked page before you go. Ranked from the most serious; low-risk and not-yet-assessed fells are not shown. Whichever you choose, make sure your navigation is up to it: many of these tops are broad and featureless in cloud, where solid map-and-compass skills are what get you down safely — see our guide to Lake District navigation.

Risk level
  1. Scafell PikeExtreme
    Piers Gill — a deep hidden ravine beside the path that has killed walkers who stray off-line in mist.
  2. ScafellExtreme
    Broad Stand — a short rock step that lures Scafell Pike walkers into a lethal down-climb.
  3. HelvellynHigh
    Striding Edge & Swirral Edge — exposed knife-edge arêtes with a long fatal-fall history, lethal in wind or ice.
  4. BlencathraHigh
    Sharp Edge — a slabby, polished arête that is one of the most accident-prone spots in the Lakes when wet or iced.
  5. Pavey ArkHigh
    Jack's Rake — a committing, polished scramble up the crag face with repeated fatal falls.
  6. PillarHigh
    Pillar Rock and the exposed High Level Route, in remote country far from help.
  7. Great GableHigh
    A boulder-strewn summit that's a navigation trap in cloud, ringed by the steep Napes crags.
  8. BowfellHigh
    A confusing boulder summit and crag edges (the Great Slab) where nav errors lead onto steep ground.
  9. Dow CragHigh
    A major climbing cliff above Goat's Water — serious falls, rockfall and a cliff-edge summit.
  10. LingmellHigh
    Piers Gill (accident blackspot)

Each rating is our own summary of published Mountain Rescue incident reports — open any fell's hazard page to see the sources behind it.

The fell lists, and how they differ

Over the years walkers and surveyors have drawn up different lists of fells, and they fall into two broad families.

Guidebook rounds

One person’s chosen selection of fells worth climbing — subjective, opinionated and almost always confined to the Lake District. They include the Wainwrights (the classic 214), the Outlying Fells, the Birketts (the most complete Lakeland round), the Fellrangers and the Synges. Two walkers' lists can disagree about what counts as a separate fell.

Prominence lists

Objective and rule-based, defined by measurement rather than opinion, and usually cover the whole country. A summit qualifies by its height and/or its prominence — how far you must descend before you can climb anything higher. They include the Nuttalls (2,000 ft with 15 m of drop), the Marilyns (150 m of drop, any height) and the HuMPs (100 m of drop). The same fell often appears on several lists at once — Scafell Pike, for instance, is a Wainwright, a Birkett, a Synge, a Nuttall and a Marilyn.