Ponsonby Fell
2 classifications here — Birkett and Synge — belong to lists OpenFell holds only part of, so they have no list page. See how far the coverage goes.
- Height
- 315 m · 1,033 ft
- Prominence
- 37 m
- Grid reference
- NY 08198 07031
- Coordinates
- 54.45036, -3.41737
- County / area
- Cumberland
- Region
- Lake District C&W
- OS Landranger
- 89
- OS Explorer
- OL6N 303
- Summit feature
- cairn
- Key col
- NY080074 (278 m)
About Ponsonby Fell
Ponsonby Fell lies near Gosforth in the western Lake District and reaches around 315 m. Wainwright gave it a chapter in The Outlying Fells of Lakeland, tracing an anticlockwise horseshoe from Gosforth that follows the River Bleng before turning north for the top, then dropping to Wellington; he advised catching a bus back rather than walking the A595, which he called busy, dangerous and without a footpath.
He was blunt about the hill's appeal, writing that there are no fells not worth climbing but that Ponsonby Fell comes very near to being one. The summit, he said, is reached with a conviction that nobody has ever been there before, a conviction undone by the small cairn already standing on it.
Background written from facts in the Wikipedia article on Ponsonby 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
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Computed astronomically for 54.450, -3.417. Plan your finish with the daylight safety planner.
Summit weather live
Loading forecast for the summit (315 m)…
Forecast adjusted to summit altitude. Weather data from MET Norway (CC BY 4.0).
Finding the summit
ground to 6m NNE 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
- 25-Jan-24
- Drop measured from
- NY080074 · 278 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.
Which hill this one belongs to
Ponsonby 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, 278 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.