Atlas · Collections

Landmarks worth the detour

Trig pillars, waterfalls, bothies, stone circles and the other places a walk tends to pass. Each set lists every landmark Atlas knows about.

All collections · Hill lists · Trails · Landmarks

• Trig Points - 6,436 landmarks
  Ordnance Survey triangulation pillars, built from 1936 onwards to re-survey Britain and made obsolete by GPS, the very thing that now finds them for you. Atlas tracks every standing pillar in the OS archive, over 6,000 of them, from busy summit pillars to forgotten ones in field corners and back gardens. The longest-running collectible in British walking.
• Waterfalls - 151 landmarks
  150 of Britain's notable falls, forces, sgwds and spouts, from High Force on the Tees to Eas a' Chual Aluinn, at around 200 m the highest in Britain. Best collected in the wet, which in these islands is rarely a constraint.
• Viewpoints - 70 landmarks
  Named vistas and celebrated outlooks across the UK: Surprise View above Derwentwater, Queen's View over Loch Tummel, and dozens more from sea cliffs to city rims. The easiest collection to start, and a standing excuse to stop walking for a minute.
• Stone Circles - 312 landmarks
  Over 300 Neolithic and Bronze Age stone circles, from Avebury's village-swallowing ring to Callanish on Lewis, most of them 3,000 to 5,000 years old. Nobody knows exactly what they were for, which has never stopped anyone visiting.
• Bothies - 198 landmarks
  Nearly 200 open mountain shelters, most maintained by the Mountain Bothies Association's volunteers: unlocked, unbooked and free to anyone who walks in. The code is simple: leave it as you found it, or slightly better.
• Mountain Huts & Shelters - 57 landmarks
  Club huts, refuges and emergency shelters scattered through the UK's hills, from alpine-style bunkhouses to single-room stone howffs. Less romantic than bothies, considerably more likely to have a roof that works.
• Iconic Bridges - 32 landmarks
  A hand-picked set of 32 bridges, viaducts and crossings worth a detour: the Ribblehead Viaduct, the Forth Bridge, Telford's Menai crossing and more. Engineering as landscape; several are best collected from a passing train.
• Caves & Caverns - 67 landmarks
  A curated set of caves, caverns and quarry chambers worth walking to: Thor's Cave above the Manifold, Fingal's Cave on Staffa, Cathedral Cave in Little Langdale and the great show caves of Cheddar and Castleton. Natural or man-made, all chosen for the visit, not the crawl — no ropes, no wetsuits.