Gale Fell
Short entry: no route or hazard notes for this fell yet.
Gale Fell (518 m / 1,699 ft) is a Birkett (one of the 541 tops in Bill Birkett's Complete Lakeland Fells), in the Western Fells. Its nearest tops are Great Borne (1.0 km W); Starling Dodd (1.0 km SE); Floutern Cop (1.5 km NW).
Summit conditions on Gale Fell
On the summit on Tuesday 27 October: 12° to 6°C, gusts to 64 mph, 2.8 mm of rain forecast over the whole day, midnight to midnight.
The forecast figures are Open-Meteo’s, worked out for the summit’s height. How we check →
Parking & buses
Routes near Gale Fell
No route guide for this fell yet. The nearest route starts we publish, in a straight line from the summit:
- Round Ennerdale Water from Bowness Knott — starts 2.6 km away
- Around Loweswater — starts 4.6 km away
- Birketts by Loweswater — starts 4.6 km away
Conditions and 7-day summit forecast
Modelled for the 518 m summit (Open-Meteo). Check the Met Office mountain forecast and MWIS before you set off.
Full 7-day forecast
Taken 27 October 2026, 20:59 UTC; the live forecast replaces it when it loads. Weather data by Open-Meteo.com (opens in new tab)
Parking & buses for Gale Fell
Parking
Positions are approximate.
Of the pay-and-display machine tickets sold at Buttermere from 17 August 2024 to 31 March 2026, 15% were bought before 10am (our count of FOI/2026.500 ticket data). Contains public sector information provided by the Lake District National Park Authority and licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
Vehicles are left at their owner’s risk: we list places people park and cannot vouch for any of them. Take valuables with you and leave nothing on show.
Buses
The nearest bus stop we hold is the 77 and 77A stop at Buttermere, outside Court Hotel, 8.9 km of walking from the nearest parking for this fell — no bus route we hold serves it. It is a seasonal service too: 1 November 2026 is its last day of the year (confirmed with the operator, 29 August 2026); it returns on 22 March 2027.
Getting there across the Lake District: Buses · Parking map · By train · By boat
Hazards on Gale Fell
We have not written a hazard card for this fell yet, and that is not a sign that it is low-hazard. Check the forecast, carry a map and compass, and turn back in cloud if the ground is not what you expected. The National Park Authority’s What to pack page, AdventureSmart’s hill walking kit list and Mountain Rescue England and Wales’s safety page are linked from our what to carry guide.
If you need Mountain Rescue
Dial 999 or 112 and ask for the Police, then Mountain Rescue.
Before you call, have ready: where you are (a grid reference if you can – the OS Locate app shows yours on your phone), what has happened, how many of you there are, and your mobile number.
Then stay where you are until the rescue team contacts you.
If you cannot make a voice call because of a hearing or speech impairment, emergency SMS works only if you have registered first: text “register” to 999.
From Mountain Rescue England and Wales’s guidance on calling them out (opens in new tab) (read 26 October 2026).
Map & nearby Birketts
Skip mapFree mapping: OpenTopoMap / OpenStreetMap, with SRTM elevation data (switch layers top-right).
Parking, toilets and buses: Parking & buses ↑.
Birketts within 3 km of Gale Fell
These Birkett tops are not Wainwright summits. Distances are straight lines: check the ground and access on a map before adding one.
On the hill: terrain and water on Gale Fell
Terrain & access
A near-path top (about 518 m): a mapped path comes within about 194 m of the summit. We have not checked a way from it to the top: the figures here are measured along a straight line on a terrain model, not a route. That line climbs about 12 m. The direct line crosses 1 fence.
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 v18.4 (CC BY 4.0); Copernicus GLO-30. See the terrain & access report for how this is worked out across all 144 fells.
Access on Gale Fell
Access: summit and direct approach lie within mapped open-access land (CRoW). The usual access-land conditions apply.
Walls & fences: the approach crosses a fence. No stile or gate is mapped within 150 m of the crossing — that’s a statement about the map, not the fence, which may well have one. Expect to walk the fence to find a crossing rather than climbing it, and turn back if you find none: fences are working boundaries and take real damage from climbers.
Local restrictions can close open-access areas temporarily — check the official open-access information (opens in new tab) before travelling.
How we worked out the access
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 26 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 377 fells.
Access land: © Natural England copyright. Contains Ordnance Survey data © Crown copyright and database right 2026.
About Gale Fell
Classifications & hill data
Is Gale Fell a Wainwright?
Gale Fell is not a Wainwright. It is on the Birkett list.
Selected lists
This is the summit’s grid reference. If you call from anywhere else, give your own position, not this one.
Lists, height and summit position from the Database of British and Irish Hills; the feet are converted from its metres and the grid reference from that position. How we check →