Guides · How-to · 18 July 2026

How many Wainwrights have I done? Three ways to find out

Reconstructing your Wainwright count from maps, memory or GPS data, and why the GPS answer is the only one you can trust.

It's a question with a surprisingly slippery answer. The list is fixed, all 214 of Alfred Wainwright's fells, but your history isn't written anywhere. Or rather, it is, and we'll get to that.

Method one: sit down with a map

Print a Wainwrights checklist (or open the full list), pour a drink, and go fell by fell. Was I on Catbells? Obviously. Armboth Fell? Hmm.

This takes an evening and produces a number you half trust. The problem cases are always the same:

  • Ridge tops. If you walked the Fairfield Horseshoe, you crossed Hart Crag and Dove Crag whether you remember them or not. Do they count if you didn't notice them at the time? (Yes. But did you actually take the path over the top, or the one round the side?)
  • The unglamorous ones. Mungrisdale Common, Armboth Fell, Latrigg from the car park. Nobody remembers these; they get double-counted or lost entirely.
  • Pre-2010 walking. Anything before your first GPS-recording phone is folklore.

Method two: ask your walking partner

Faster, and it comes with editorial commentary. Accuracy: variable. Two people who did every walk together will still disagree about whether the Dodds happened in 2017 or 2018 and whether you went over Watson's Dodd or around it. (You went around it.)

Method three: let your GPS history answer

If your walks are on Strava, or scattered across GPX files from an old Garmin, the true answer is already recorded, timestamped and arguable-with. Every summit you visited sits inside a track log.

Atlas automates the reconstruction: connect Strava or upload your GPX archive, and it matches your tracks against the surveyed summit locations of all 214 fells. Passing within 75 m of a top logs the ascent with its date. The result isn't an estimate; it's the walked record, including every Hart Crag you crossed without ceremony and every unnamed reascent of Catbells.

Two things it won't do: recover walks you never recorded, and credit fells where your path skirted the summit. The 75 m rule is deliberately strict. A count you can defend in the pub is worth more than a bigger one you can't.

What people find

The pattern from early testers: the real number is usually within ten of the guess, but the composition is wrong. Fells people were sure about turn out unvisited; fells they'd never have claimed turn up twice. The forgetting isn't random, it clusters on ridge lines and on anything climbed as part of a bigger day.

Finding out takes about two minutes if your history is on Strava. It's free, and the number you get is the one that was always true.

Related

Your GPS history already knows your number.

Atlas matches your Strava or GPX archive against every UK peak, trail and trig point. Find out free.