Three New Fellrangers

The Fellrangers is a list of Lake District Fells first detailed in the eight “Fellranger” guidebooks written by Mark Richards and published by Cicerone.  There were (note the tense!) 227 of them and I completed them in 2013.

There is a lot of overlap between this list and the Wainwrights and that shouldn’t some as too much of a surprise as Mark was somewhat of a protégé of Alfred Wainwright; anybody ticking the Wainwrights wouldn’t have to expend much more effort to complete the more modern list.  But, as is so often with guidebooks, the routes to the summits subtly change and revision is required to keep the information current.

The guidebooks are currently in the middle of such a revision process and the first two (“Wasdale” and “Langdale”) were published in late 2019.  In the back of each of them is a list of the Fellrangers and the new volumes in which the summits are or will be detailed.  And there are 230 of them!

So, having completed a list I find out that now I haven’t!  But what are the differences between the old and the new?

It didn’t take long to work out, but it really is as simple as the addition of three new summits.  All three are on the Borrowdale watershed, not the famous valley that feeds Derwentwater, but the lesser known Westmorland namesake that can be found between the A6 and the M6, leading into the River Lune.  It’s part of the extension to the Lake District National Park that occurred in August 2016.

The three new summits are Grayrigg Forest, Whinfell Beacon and Winterscleugh.  The first two are on the southern watershed and the third is on the north and they can be ticked in one walk with Richards’ new “Mardale and the Far East” guidebook detailing such a route. 

Now all I have to do is take a trip up north to complete the Fellrangers – again!