Gale Fell
Gale Fell (518 m / 1,699 ft) is a Birkett (one of the 541 tops in Bill Birkett's Complete Lakeland Fells), one of the lesser-known Western tops.
Is it worth going? — Today’s conditions & 7-day summit forecast
Modelled guidance for the 518 m summit. Always check the Met Office mountain forecast and MWIS before you set off.
On the summit today (Sat 12 Sep): 14° to 8°C, gusts to 47 mph, 27.7 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 518 m summit altitude via Open-Meteo. Summit conditions are always harsher than the valley — check the professional mountain forecasts before you go.
Gale Fell at a glance
Getting there
Classifications & hill data
The short answers
Is Gale Fell a Wainwright?
Gale Fell is not a Wainwright. It is on the Birkett list.
Where do you park for Gale Fell?
We hold no car park within 2.5 km of the summit, so there is no short walk-in to recommend here. 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 Gale Fell
No route guide for this fell yet. The nearest routes we publish start close by:
- Scale Fell and Mellbreak — starts 4.0 km away
- Buttermere lake circuit — starts 4.0 km away
- The Buttermere Ridge — starts 4.0 km away
Parking & buses for Gale Fell
Best parking to hike Gale Fell
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 Gale Fell by bus
The nearest bus stop we hold is the 77 at Buttermere, outside Court Hotel, 8.9 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 Gale Fell
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: Bowness Knott, Ennerdale (Forestry, paid), about 2.6 km from the summit (straight line). Full parking, toilets and bus details are below.
Birketts near Gale Fell (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 Gale Fell
Terrain & access
A near-path top (about 518 m): a mapped path comes within about 194 m of the summit, with a last stretch of open ground (about 12 m of ascent, up to ~10°). The summit is on CRoW open access land. The direct line crosses 1 wall.
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 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: dry-stone walls 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 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.
Other fells near Gale Fell
- Base Brown
- Blake Fell
- Brandreth
- Buckbarrow
- Burnbank Fell
- Caw Fell
- Crag Fell
- Fellbarrow - Mosser Fell
- Fleetwith Pike
- Gavel Fell
- Great Borne
- Great Gable
- Green Gable
- Grey Knotts
- Grike
- Haycock
- Haystacks (Buttermere)
- Hen Comb
- High Crag (Buttermere)
- High Stile
- Kirk Fell
- Lank Rigg
- Low Fell
- Mellbreak (Mellbreak South Top)
- Middle Fell
- Pillar
- Red Pike (Buttermere)
- Red Pike (Wasdale)
- Scoat Fell (Little Scoat Fell)
- Seatallan
- Starling Dodd
- Steeple
- Yewbarrow