Swirl How

About Swirl How

Swirl How stands between Coniston and the Duddon Valley in the south of the Lake District, and rivals the Old Man of Coniston for the title of highest ground in the traditional County Palatine of Lancashire.

It is part of the Coniston, or Furness, Fells, the watershed between Coniston Water and the Duddon valley. That range starts at Wrynose Pass and runs roughly 16 km south before fading out at Broughton in Furness on the Duddon Estuary. Wainwright treated only its northern half as Lakeland proper in his Pictorial Guide, relegating the southern fells to The Outlying Fells of Lakeland — so Swirl How, a major high point of the northern half, is one of the 214 Wainwrights. Later guidebook writers have taken in the whole range.

Background written from facts in the Wikipedia article on Swirl How (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 54.395, -3.122. Plan your finish with the daylight safety planner.

Finding the summit

The recorded summit point is cairn incorporating large rock. On broad or flat summits the obvious cairn is not always the true high point.

Survey method

Leica NA730/Leica GS15

Record revised

23-Oct-23

Drop measured from

SD270994 · 683 m

Classification history: probably lower than The Old Man of Coniston, see hill 2634.

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

Swirl How is not counted as an independent hill in its own right. In prominence terms it belongs to The Old Man of Coniston (802 m) — the nearest Marilyn you can reach from this summit without first dropping below its key col, 683 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