The Calf

About The Calf

The Calf is the highest ground in the Howgill Fells, in the north-west of the Yorkshire Dales. Approaches run up from Sedbergh to the south, by way of Cautley Spout from the east, or along the long valley of Langdale from the north; the Sedbergh line is the most used and stays on good paths throughout.

The summit is a plateau, and its flatness hides foreground detail while leaving a long panorama: some twenty miles of Lakeland skyline, the Yorkshire Three Peaks, and much of the rest of the Howgills.

Alfred Wainwright, in Walks on the Howgill Fells, called the Sedbergh round over Calders and The Calf the classic high-level walk of the group. He drew the summit trig point, wrote about a reclining standing stone 400 yards to the north-east that appears on large-scale Ordnance Survey maps, and gave a full column to the vexed altitude of Calders, which he put at 2,215 ft.

Background written from facts in the Wikipedia article on The Calf (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 54.368, -2.513. Plan your finish with the daylight safety planner.

Finding the summit

The recorded summit point is small cairn 20m SE of trig point. 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

21-Jul-24

Drop measured from

NY 7322 0064 · 293.6 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.

The The Calf group

3 other listed summits sit in the same prominence group, with The Calf as the independent hill at its head.

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