Watch Hill
Short entry: no route or hazard notes for this fell yet.
Watch Hill (236 m / 773 ft) is the western, lower of the two grassy tops of the Watch Hill ridge, on the far north-western fringe of the Lake District directly above Cockermouth.
Summit conditions on Watch Hill
On the summit on Tuesday 27 October: 14° to 9°C, gusts to 53 mph, 2.4 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 Watch Hill
No route guide for this fell yet. The nearest route starts we publish, in a straight line from the summit:
- Rivings and Lothwaite — starts 4.3 km away
- Ling Fell & Sale Fell — starts 4.3 km away
Conditions and 7-day summit forecast
Modelled for the 236 m summit (Open-Meteo). Check the Met Office mountain forecast and MWIS before you set off.
Full 7-day forecast
Taken 27 October 2026, 08:13 UTC; the live forecast replaces it when it loads. Weather data by Open-Meteo.com (opens in new tab)
Parking & buses for Watch Hill
Parking
2 more places to park near Watch Hill
Positions are approximate.
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 X4 and X5 stop at Embleton, at Lambfoot, a 1.9 km walk from the nearest parking for this fell. We haven’t mapped a route up it, so we can’t tell you the walk from there to the start. As timetabled from 27 October to 1 November. Towards Keswick (X5): Tuesday to Thursday 21:32; Friday and Saturday 23:47; Sunday 17:52. Checked against the operator’s timetable, 24 September 2026. Times here are a guide, not a promise — leave yourself more than the minute.
Rural routes change seasonally — confirm on stagecoachbus.com (opens in new tab) or Traveline before relying on a last bus.
Getting there across the Lake District: Buses · Parking map · By train · By boat
Hazards on Watch Hill
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 Watch Hill
No bonus Birketts within 3 km.
On the hill: terrain and water on Watch Hill
Terrain & access
A 236 m top with a mapped path to within about 6 m of the summit.
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 Watch Hill
Access: Watch Hill sits beside Forestry England’s Setmurthy forest, which the landowner manages for public access with permissive paths; we have not confirmed that the summit itself is inside it, so check Forestry England’s current information and the signs on the ground. (Source: Forestry England (Setmurthy) (opens in new tab), FE public forest; walkers/riders welcomed; forestry operations can divert paths, accessed 2026-07-29.)
Closures and re-routes are announced by the landowner, not on the national map.
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 Watch Hill
Classifications & hill data
Is Watch Hill a Wainwright?
Watch Hill is one of Wainwright's Outlying Fells, not one of the 214 in the Pictorial Guides.
Selected lists
This is the summit’s grid reference. If you call from anywhere else, give your own position, not this one.
The summit is not a Birkett top.
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 →