Swarth Fell

About Swarth Fell

Swarth Fell is best understood as the southern continuation of Wild Boar Fell rather than a separate hill: roughly 1.6 km of high ground built of limestone with a millstone grit cap, with the cairned summit lying 2.1 km south of Wild Boar Fell's top. The two are divided by a col holding several cairns and a small tarn.

That tarn went unnamed for a long time. Alfred Wainwright referred to it only as a small, nameless sheet of water, and it was not until 2017 that the Ordnance Survey accepted Swarth Fell Tarn as its label on maps. About a kilometre to the south-east stands the fell's second high point, Swarth Fell Pike, at 651 m.

Most of the ground lies in Mallerstang, though the Cumbria–North Yorkshire boundary, formerly Westmorland against the West Riding, follows the crest just west of the highest ground. The name is Norse, from svartr, meaning dark. Baugh Fell lies 5.3 km to the south-west beyond Grisedale.

Background written from facts in the Wikipedia article on Swarth 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

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 54.365, -2.377. Plan your finish with the daylight safety planner.

Finding the summit

The recorded summit point is embedded rock 15m W of 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

08-May-25

Drop measured from

SD752973 · 601 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

Swarth Fell is not counted as an independent hill in its own right. In prominence terms it belongs to Wild Boar Fell (708 m) — the nearest Marilyn you can reach from this summit without first dropping below its key col, 601 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