The Pike
The Pike (370 m / 1,214 ft) rises on the Whitfell moors above the Duddon valley, in the empty south-western marches between Ulpha and Corney Fell.
Is it worth going? — Today’s conditions & 7-day summit forecast
Modelled guidance for the 370 m summit. Always check the Met Office mountain forecast and MWIS before you set off.
On the summit today (Sat 12 Sep): 15° to 10°C, gusts to 46 mph, 28.6 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 370 m summit altitude via Open-Meteo. Summit conditions are always harsher than the valley — check the professional mountain forecasts before you go.
The Pike at a glance
Routes up The Pike
Hand-mapped, with GPX to download — full maps further down.
Classifications & hill data
The short answers
Is The Pike a Wainwright?
The Pike is one of Wainwright's Outlying Fells, not one of the 214 in the Pictorial Guides. It is also on the Birkett list and the Synge list.
Where do you park for The Pike?
The nearest car park we hold is The Pike (layby), about 1.1 km from the summit in a straight line. The next is The Pike (verge), 1.1 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.
How hard is The Pike?
The shortest way up we hold is Ulpha Birketts — 15.9 km, 719 m of ascent, about 4.4 hours. On our scale its hardest axis is navigation — Hard.
All axes: navigation: Hard · steepness: Hard · length: Hard · exposure: Moderate · terrain: Moderate.
Parking & buses for The Pike
Best parking to hike The Pike
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 The Pike by bus
The nearest bus stop we hold is the 505 at Coniston, outside The Ruskin Centre, 13.4 km of walking from the start — not realistically reachable without a car.
Rural routes change seasonally — confirm on stagecoachbus.com (opens in new tab) or Traveline before relying on a last bus.
Hazards on The Pike
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: The Pike (layby), about 1.1 km from the summit (straight line). Full parking, toilets and bus details are below.
Birketts near The Pike (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.
Routes over The Pike
✎️ Planned route — drawn but not personally walked or checked yet.
A planned line is a suggestion, not a guarantee — conditions change. Navigate independently and carry a map & compass. How to use this guide.
On the hill: terrain and water on The Pike
Terrain & access
A near-path top (about 370 m): a mapped path comes within about 236 m of the summit, with a last stretch of open ground (about 125 m of ascent, up to ~56°). There is steep ground (over 30°) on the direct line — pick your line with care. The summit is on CRoW open access land. The direct line crosses 2 walls.
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 The Pike
Access: summit and direct approach lie within mapped open-access land (CRoW). The usual access-land conditions apply.
Walls & fences: the approach crosses a wall. No stile or gate is mapped within 150 m of the crossing — that’s a statement about the map, not the wall, which may well have one. Expect to walk the wall to find a crossing rather than climbing it: dry-stone walls are working boundaries and take real damage from climbers.
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.