Dent
Dent at 346m (1,135ft) is an Outlying Fell above the west Cumbrian coastal plain near Cleator, giving views across the Irish Sea and east to the fells of the Ennerdale and Wasdale area.
Is it worth going? — Today’s conditions & 7-day summit forecast
Modelled guidance for the 346 m summit. Always check the Met Office mountain forecast and MWIS before you set off.
On the summit today (Sat 12 Sep): 17° to 10°C, gusts to 39 mph, 26.1 mm of rain forecast.
Forecast snapshot from 12 Sep 2026, 18:50 UTC — refreshed nightly and updated live in your browser. Temperatures and gusts adjusted to the 346 m summit altitude via Open-Meteo. Summit conditions are always harsher than the valley — check the professional mountain forecasts before you go.
Dent at a glance
Getting there
Classifications & hill data
The short answers
Is Dent a Wainwright?
Dent is one of Wainwright's Outlying Fells, not one of the 214 in the Pictorial Guides.
Where do you park for Dent?
The nearest car park we hold is Dent, north-east car park (free), about 1.0 km from the summit in a straight line. The next is Dent (layby), 1.5 km out. We only look within 2.5 km, measured straight-line: over longer distances a road may cross a pass and the drive bears no relation to the line.
Routes up Dent
No route guide for this fell yet. The nearest routes we publish start close by:
- Grike, Crag Fell and Lank Rigg — starts 2.4 km away
Parking & buses for Dent
Best parking to hike Dent
Where we have the data, each parking spot also shows the nearest public toilets and facilities (cafés, pubs, shops).
Positions are approximate — zoom the map to confirm. Lakeland car parks fill before 9am on fine weekends.
Tip: pan and zoom the interactive map at the top of this page to spot other potential parking near your route.
Vehicles are left entirely at their owner’s risk. We list places people park; we cannot vouch for any of them. Judge it on the day: take valuables with you, leave nothing on show, and if a spot feels wrong when you get there, park somewhere else.
Getting to Dent by bus
The nearest bus stop we hold is the 77 at Buttermere, outside Court Hotel, 16.4 km of walking from the start — not realistically reachable without a car. It is a seasonal service too: 1 November 2026 is its last day of the year (confirmed with the operator, 29 August 2026).
Rural routes change seasonally — confirm on stagecoachbus.com (opens in new tab) or Traveline before relying on a last bus.
Hazards on Dent
No hazard card for this fell. The usual open-fell rules apply: check the forecast, carry a map and compass, and turn back in cloud if the ground is not what you expected.
Map & nearby Birketts
Skip mapFree mapping: OpenTopoMap / OpenStreetMap (switch layers top-right). Parking positions are approximate.
Nearest parking: Dent, north-east car park (free), about 1.0 km from the summit (straight line). Full parking, toilets and bus details are below.
Birketts near Dent (within 3 km)
These Birkett tops are not Wainwright summits — detour to them on this walk and they are pure profit. Distances are straight-line; allow extra for terrain.
On the hill: terrain and water on Dent
Terrain & access
A 346 m top with a mapped path to within about 4 m of the summit. The summit is not on CRoW open access land, and the direct approach crosses land that is neither access land nor a right of way — there may be no public right to the top, so check access before you go.
Computed from open data, not walked — pathless ground needs confident navigation, and mapped paths, barriers and access boundaries can be incomplete. Data © OpenStreetMap contributors (via Overpass); Natural England CRoW Access Land; DoBIH; Copernicus GLO-30. See the terrain & access report for how this is worked out across all 144 fells.
Access on Dent
Access: the open datasets show no access land and no recorded right of way reaching this summit. That describes the mapping, not necessarily the ground — permissive arrangements often go unmapped — but we don’t publish approach detail for fells where we can’t point to a public right or a landowner’s invitation. If you know of an access arrangement for this fell, we’d genuinely like to hear about it.
Local restrictions can close open-access areas temporarily — check the official open-access information (opens in new tab) before travelling.
How we worked this out
Summit and approach positions are tested against Natural England’s CRoW Act 2000 access layer; rights of way and wall or fence detail come from OpenStreetMap. Both are open datasets with known gaps — in our own survey only 4 of 23 wall and fence crossings had a stile or gate mapped within 150 m — so absence of a mapped feature never means absence of a real one. Nothing here is field-verified unless marked, and none of it is legal advice. How we checked 378 fells.