Orrest Head

About Orrest Head

Orrest Head has a place in fellwalking history out of all proportion to its 238 metres: it was the first fell Wainwright climbed, above the eastern shore of Windermere. He wrote of it as a first sight of mountains ranked across glittering water, an awakening to beauty, and later as a fitting finale to a life of fellwandering.

A panorama indicator on the summit names the fells in view, among them the Old Man of Coniston, Scafell Pike, Great Gable, Fairfield and the Langdale Pikes.

The usual approach is straight up from Windermere town near the station, along a reinstated Victorian carriageway. The Lake District National Park Authority adopted this as its 50th Miles Without Stiles route, usable with pushchairs and motorised off-road mobility scooters. Shorter, steeper cut-throughs exist in places.

Background written from facts in the Wikipedia article on Orrest Head (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

—

Sunset

—

Daylight

—

Civil twilight ends

—

Computed astronomically for 54.386, -2.903. Plan your finish with the daylight safety planner.

Finding the summit

The recorded summit point is rock 1m NNE of stone seat. That distinction matters on broad or flat tops, where the obvious cairn is not always the true high point.

Survey method

obvious summit

Record revised

25-Jan-24

Drop measured from

SD416998 · 170 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

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

Which hill this one belongs to

Orrest Head is not counted as an independent hill in its own right. In prominence terms it belongs to High Street (829 m) — the nearest Marilyn you can reach from this summit without first dropping below its key col, 170 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