Dunstable Downs

About Dunstable Downs

A chalk escarpment at the north-eastern end of the Chiltern Hills, Dunstable Downs reach 243 metres and form the highest ground in Bedfordshire. The town of Dunstable lies alongside and gives the downs their name.

Height has always made the site useful. Between 1808 and 1814 it carried a station on the shutter telegraph chain linking the Admiralty in London to naval ships at Great Yarmouth. Today gliders, hang gliders, paragliders and kite fliers use the airflow off the scarp, and the London Gliding Club sits at the foot of the slope. Whipsnade Zoo has cut a large lion figure into the chalk on one of the hillsides, visible from the B489 between Aylesbury and Dunstable.

Background written from facts in the Wikipedia article on Dunstable Downs (CC BY-SA 4.0). Heights, prominence and grid references come from the Database of British & Irish Hills, not from Wikipedia.

Access rights here

General position for England — local byelaws, seasonal restrictions and closures can override it. Full details: access rights in England · check another location.

Daylight at this summit today

Sunrise

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Sunset

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Daylight

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Civil twilight ends

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Computed astronomically for 51.864, -0.536. Plan your finish with the daylight safety planner.

Finding the summit

The recorded summit point is trig point. That distinction matters on broad or flat tops, where the obvious cairn is not always the true high point.

Survey method

Abney level

Record revised

08-Jun-09

Drop measured from

SP990164 · 138 m

Survey notes are field observations recorded in the Database of British & Irish Hills (v18.3, CC BY 4.0) by the hill-surveying community.

Long-distance paths past this hill

2 waymarked long-distance routes run within 2.5 km of the summit — useful if you are linking this hill into a longer walk, or want a made path for the approach.

Route lines © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL); distance from the summit computed by OpenFell.

Which hill this one belongs to

Dunstable Downs is not counted as an independent hill in its own right. In prominence terms it belongs to Wendover Woods (268 m) — the nearest Marilyn you can reach from this summit without first dropping below its key col, 138 m.

Grouping is by prominence alone: a summit belongs to the nearest higher Marilyn it connects to without a deeper intervening col. Over a large massif that can gather hills no one would walk in a single day, and which few would describe as parts of the same mountain — it is a measure of independence, not a suggested route.

Nearest listed peaks