The Wainwrights

What counts as a Wainwright

The Lake District fells given their own chapter in A. Wainwright's seven-volume Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells (1955–1966). Membership is editorial, not metric — Wainwright chose them, and no height or drop rule will reproduce the list.

Because the selection is one person's judgement rather than a formula, the list is fixed: it cannot grow or shrink with resurveys, and every subsequent revision of the Pictorial Guides has kept the same 214 chapters. That stability is part of why completing the round became such a well-defined objective.

OpenFell holds every GB member of this list. Heights, drops and grid references are the surveyed figures from the Database of British & Irish Hills, not the round numbers printed in older guidebooks — so a hill occasionally sits a metre either side of where you expect it.

What else the Wainwrights count for

Most British hills appear on more than one list, so a single walk often ticks several boxes at once. Of the 214 Wainwrights:

• 113 also appear on Nuttalls.
• 96 also appear on Hewitts.
• 30 also appear on Deweys.
• 4 also appear on Furths.
• 3 also appear on Historic county tops.

Counted against the other lists OpenFell holds in full. Lists the site carries only part of — Marilyns, HuMPs, Simms and the rest — are left out rather than reported as a fraction of themselves.

Where they are

Every one is in England. The list spreads across 4 hill-survey regions, concentrated in Lake District C&W.

All 214 sit inside the Lake District National Park, where park byelaws can restrict camping and access beyond the general position for the nation.

How the heights fall

All 214 Wainwrights, tallest first

Hill data from the Database of British & Irish Hills v18.3 (CC BY 4.0). Drop is the descent to the hill's key col; a dash means it is not recorded in our dataset. Follow any name for grid references to ten figures, access rights, live summit weather and today's daylight.