Ryan
OpenFell is written and maintained by one person. This page exists so you can judge whether that person has any business telling you about UK hills.
Where the hill experience comes from
Eleven years in Scouting
More than a decade of hill days, expeditions and navigation practice through Scouting — the grounding for how this site treats maps, weather and turning back.
Scottish mountaineering courses, summer and winter
Multiple mountaineering courses in the Scottish Highlands across both seasons. Winter in Scotland is a different mountain range from the one you walked in August, and the site is written by someone who has been on those hills when it is.
Led a Ten Tors team
Led a team through Ten Tors on Dartmoor — the annual long-distance moorland challenge. Route planning against a clock, in poor visibility, with a group whose pace is not your own.
What that does and doesn't qualify me to say
It means the safety pages are not written from a search-results summary. I have been on Scottish hills in winter conditions on a course, led a group across Dartmoor against a clock, and spent eleven years in Scouting where the hill day ends when the slowest member says it ends. Those experiences shape the editorial line here: present the data, state the assumptions, and never tell you a day is safe.
It does not make me a qualified instructor. I hold no Mountain Training award, and nothing on this site should be read as instruction or as a substitute for training with someone who does hold one. If you want to learn winter skills, book a course — that is what I did.
How I approach the access-rights pages
Access law is the part of this site that most needs getting right, and it is the part where hill experience counts for least. So those pages are built the other way round: every position is stated against the legislation or judgment it comes from, each page carries the date it was last reviewed, and the summaries say plainly that they are general information rather than legal advice. Where the law is genuinely unsettled — the repeal of the rights-of-way registration deadline is the live example — the pages say so instead of picking an answer.
How the numbers are made
The calculators are not black boxes. Walking times come from Naismith's rule with Langmuir and Tranter-style corrections, and every estimate shows its own breakdown so you can see which assumption you disagree with. Sunrise, sunset and grid conversions are computed from published formulae rather than fetched from an API. The data sources page lists every dataset, its licence and how often it refreshes.
Corrections
If something here is wrong — a height, an access position, a formula, a claim about a hill I have never stood on — I would rather know. Contact details are on the about page. Corrections to access-rights content are treated as priority, because those are the pages where being wrong has consequences.
OpenFell lists over fifteen hundred summits. I have not been up most of them, and the site never pretends otherwise: hill pages present sourced data and computed values, not invented trip reports. Where I do have first-hand knowledge of an area, the page says so explicitly.