Lovely Seat

About Lovely Seat

Lovely Seat forms part of the high ground dividing Wensleydale from Swaledale, three miles north of Hawes, and is the highest point of Abbotside Common. The Buttertubs Pass, carrying the minor road between Hawes and Thwaite, separates it from Great Shunner Fell to the west.

The present name appears on an Ordnance Survey map of 1856, but the older form is Lunasett, from Norse dialect for moon pasture, and commoners of Abbotside still use it. The summit carries a good-sized cairn and a stone-built chair, and looks south to the Yorkshire Three Peaks; 300 metres to the west a line of stone cairns stands clear on the skyline when the fell is seen from a distance.

Direct ascents from the valley are rare. Walkers usually take it from the top of the pass, often after Great Shunner Fell by the Pennine Way, following a fence that helps with navigation in poor visibility.

Background written from facts in the Wikipedia article on Lovely Seat (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 54.351, -2.188. Plan your finish with the daylight safety planner.

Finding the summit

The recorded summit point is ground 5m NE of shelter. On broad or flat summits the obvious cairn is not always the true high point.

Survey method

Leica NA730/Leica 530

Record revised

15-Nov-16

Drop measured from

SD 86824 95469 · 525.7 m

Classification history: formerly a Marilyn.

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

Which hill this one belongs to

Lovely Seat is not counted as an independent hill in its own right. In prominence terms it belongs to Great Shunner Fell (716 m) — the nearest Marilyn you can reach from this summit without first dropping below its key col, 526 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