- Height
- 272 m · 892 ft
- Prominence
- 74 m
- Grid reference
- NY 05250 13717
- Coordinates
- 54.50989, -3.46496
- County / area
- Cumberland
- Region
- Lake District C&W
- OS Landranger
- 89
- OS Explorer
- OL4S 303
- Summit feature
- cairn
- Key col
- NY055140 (198 m)
About Flat Fell
Flat Fell sits on the rim of the Lake District rather than inside its core, a modest 272-metre rise in Cumberland that Alfred Wainwright folded into The Outlying Fells of Lakeland. Rather than give it a chapter of its own, he paired it with neighbouring Dent, treating the two as a single round.
That round, as Wainwright set it out, runs clockwise from Wath Brow and takes in both summits. The pairing is the main reason the hill appears on walkers' lists at all, and it remains the usual context in which Flat Fell is visited.
Background written from facts in the Wikipedia article on Flat Fell (CC BY-SA 4.0). Heights, prominence and grid references come from the Database of British & Irish Hills, not from Wikipedia.
Access rights here
Conditional Right to roam: Right to roam only on mapped CRoW open access land.
Permission needed Wild camping: Needs the landowner's permission — the Dartmoor commons are the only exception in England.
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
- —
- Sunset
- —
- Daylight
- —
- Civil twilight ends
- —
Computed astronomically for 54.510, -3.465. Plan your finish with the daylight safety planner.
Summit weather live
Loading forecast for the summit (272 m)…
Forecast adjusted to summit altitude. Weather data from MET Norway (CC BY 4.0).
Finding the summit
ground 5m SE is as high.
The recorded summit point is cairn. 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
- 10-May-05
- Drop measured from
- NY055140 · 198 m
Classification history: Wainwright's sketch shows the 265m spot at NY051138 from the First Series survey, but this does not appear to correspond to any topographical feature.
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
One waymarked long-distance route runs 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 | Total length | From summit |
|---|---|---|
| Coast to Coast Walk | 303 km | 0.5 km |
Route lines © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL); distance from the summit computed by OpenFell.
Which hill this one belongs to
Flat Fell is not counted as an independent hill in its own right. In prominence terms it belongs to Pillar (892 m) — the nearest Marilyn you can reach from this summit without first dropping below its key col, 198 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.