By Ryan

What OpenFell is

OpenFell is a reference site for people planning a day on a UK hill. It carries a page for each of the 1,740 hills in the current dataset — height, drop, grid references, classifications, OS sheet numbers, nearby summits and a live summit forecast — alongside tools for estimating walking time, checking daylight, converting grid references and working out what to carry.

Its core focus is access rights. Where you may walk, roam, wild camp and take a dog differs sharply between Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and those differences are widely misunderstood — people carry Scottish assumptions into the Peak District and English assumptions into the Cairngorms. OpenFell sets out the position for each jurisdiction in plain language, with the statute and the official guidance named so you can check us.

Who writes this

OpenFell is written and maintained by one editor, Ryan, who brings eleven years in Scouting, multiple mountaineering courses in the Scottish Highlands in both summer and winter conditions, and a Ten Tors team led across Dartmoor. Ryan holds no instructor qualification, and the site never pretends otherwise — the full editor page sets out what that background does and does not qualify us to say.

What OpenFell is not

• Not a routes database. We publish data about hills, not turn-by-turn routes. Choosing a line up a hill, and judging whether it suits you on the day, is your decision and belongs on a proper map.
• Not a substitute for a map and the skills to use it. Nothing here replaces carrying an Ordnance Survey or Harvey map and a compass, and knowing how to use them when the cloud comes down and the phone dies. See the safety notes.
• Not legal advice. The access summaries are general information. Byelaws, local restrictions, temporary closures and the facts of a particular piece of land can all override the general position, and the law changes.

How pages are generated

OpenFell is a static site. Hill pages are built from the Database of British and Irish Hills and from Office for National Statistics boundary data; summit weather comes live from MET Norway. Everything else on a page is computed rather than copied: walking-time estimates from Naismith's rule with Langmuir and Tranter-style corrections, sunrise, sunset and twilight from the NOAA solar equations, and grid-reference conversions from the published OSGB36 geodetic formulae.

Every page cites what it used. The full list of datasets, with licences, required attribution and refresh cadences, is on the data sources page.

Editorial standards

We publish the formula and the source rather than a verdict. A walking-time estimate comes with the rule it used and the assumptions it made; an access summary names the Act it summarises and the date it was last reviewed; a climate figure that is indicative says so on the page. Where a question is genuinely a judgement — is this route within your ability, is today the day — we give you the inputs and leave the judgement with you, because you are the one standing at the bottom of the hill.

We do not invent numbers, and we would rather show an uncertainty than round it away. Corrections are welcome: a wrong height, a misread grid reference, a change in the law we have missed, or a formula we have applied badly. Tell us and we will fix it.

Contact

hello@openfell.example — this is a placeholder address while the site is in preview. It does not receive mail. A working address will replace it here, and on the data sources page, when the site leaves preview.