Hills Database Updated

We've just imported the latest version of the Database of British and Irish hills. We were previously on version 17.4 and we're now on 18 which was released on 29th July. Our apologies that it's taken a while to get this release online but we've made some changes with this import.

Jessie taking a break having summitted Cat Bells

Firstly we're now storing and displaying the "drop" for each hill. Drop, also known as relative height in Britain and Ireland and prominence in the US, is defined as the height difference in metres between the summit and the col connecting the hill to a higher summit. Where there is more than one such col, the highest is chosen. You can read more about this here.

Secondly we've added new classifications based on four lists:

• Ethels - these are 95 summits in the Peak District. All but two are over 300m high, with 68 being over 400m. The list's name is a tribute to Ethel Haythornthwaite who was a prime mover behind the establishment of the Peak District as Britain's first national park in 1951.

• Yeamans - hills in Scotland with an ascent of 100m all round, or, failing that, is at least 5km (walking distance) from any higher point on neighbouring hills.

• Clems - hills in England, Wales and the Isle of Man which satisfy the same conditions.

• High Hills of Britain - summits at least 838m above sea level on the mainland and above 770m on islands. The criteria for inclusion also depend on drop according to a formula that depends on height: the higher the hill, the less drop is needed to qualify. The creator of the list's objective was to cover the finest high-level walking in Scotland, England and Wales and include many worthwhile summits not listed in well-known publications.

51 hills were added, mainly Tumps in Scotland and Ethels in the Peak District but also some in Ireland and a lot of hills were also updated, mostly the positions of tops where a lot have moved by small distances and there's also a lot of more precise heights so if you want to see a list of all the changes, to names, summit feature, locations, and classifications it can be found here (big page, will take a while to load!).

You can also find a change log from the authors here.

There are few significant changes to hill lists in addition to the new classifications described above, especially for Grahams and Highland Fives. The reasons for that are described here in the entries for 24th November and 11th December 2022. The changes are as follows:

As usual your bagging lists will have been automatically updated as appropriate.

Tagged: maps, news

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