The Wainwrights in numbers

There are 214 Wainwrights. The highest is Scafell Pike at 978 m, the lowest is Castle Crag at 290 m, and four of them top 3,000 ft. The Wainwright Society's register of completers has 1,645 entries and the LDWA's has 955. The most common last fell is Great End on the first and Castle Crag on the second.

Heights and area counts come from Upfell's fell data, which uses the standard published heights. The completion figures come from two public lists. We parsed all 955 rows of the Wainwrights table on the LDWA Hillwalkers' Register, last updated 27 November 2025. We counted the Wainwright Society's list of 214 Completers on 22 September 2026, when its latest finish was dated 20 September 2026. As far as we know, nobody else has published these figures. For live counts from Upfell walkers, such as the most climbed fells in the last 30 days, see our Wainwright stats.

Heights

• The highest Wainwright is Scafell Pike, 978 m (3,209 ft).
• The lowest is Castle Crag, 290 m (951 ft), and it is the only one under 300 m.
• Four Wainwrights are over 3,000 ft (914 m): Scafell Pike (978 m), Scafell (964 m), Helvellyn (950 m) and Skiddaw (931 m).
• Great End is the nearest miss. At 910 m it falls 4 m short of 3,000 ft.
• 127 Wainwrights are over 2,000 ft (609.6 m) and 87 are under it.
• Illgill Head, at 609 m, misses 2,000 ft by less than a metre.
• 35 Wainwrights reach 800 m or more. 39 are under 500 m, and 13 are under 400 m.
• The average height is 646 m and the median is 658 m.
• Added together, the 214 summit heights come to 138,312 m. That is about 15.6 times the height of Everest (8,849 m).
• Four fells share the height of 802 m: Coniston Old Man, High Raise (Martindale), Kirk Fell and Swirl How.
• Five names appear twice: Harter Fell, High Pike, High Raise, Red Pike and Tarn Crag. The list tells them apart by valley.

The seven books and their areas

Wainwright wrote one Pictorial Guide per area, and walkers still use the book numbers as area names. The publication years come from the list of Wainwrights on Wikipedia, and the counts and heights from Upfell's fell data.

• Book One, The Eastern Fells (1955): 35 fells. Highest Helvellyn, 950 m. Lowest Arnison Crag, 433 m.
• Book Two, The Far Eastern Fells (1957): 36 fells, the most of any book. Highest High Street, 828 m. Lowest Troutbeck Tongue, 364 m.
• Book Three, The Central Fells (1958): 27 fells. Highest High Raise (Langdale), 762 m. Lowest Loughrigg Fell, 335 m.
• Book Four, The Southern Fells (1960): 30 fells. Highest Scafell Pike, 978 m. Lowest Holme Fell, 317 m.
• Book Five, The Northern Fells (1962): 24 fells, the fewest. Highest Skiddaw, 931 m. Lowest Latrigg, 368 m.
• Book Six, The North Western Fells (1964): 29 fells. Highest Grasmoor, 852 m. Lowest Castle Crag, 290 m.
• Book Seven, The Western Fells (1966): 33 fells. Highest Great Gable, 899 m. Lowest Fellbarrow, 416 m.

Set side by side:

• The Southern Fells are the highest book on average (710 m), and the Central Fells the lowest (551 m).
• No Central Fell reaches 800 m, and only 8 of the 27 top 2,000 ft. The book's highest point, High Raise, has 56 Wainwrights above it.
• The Eastern Fells hold the most 800 m summits (11), then the Southern Fells (9) and the Western Fells (8).
• Wikipedia's list says the Pictorial Guides have sold over two million copies.

Who completes the Wainwrights

On the Wainwright Society's list of 214 Completers, counted on 22 September 2026:

• There are 1,645 entries. The first is Wainwright himself, who finished on Starling Dodd on 10 September 1965.
• 34 finishes on the list are dated 2007, 100 are dated 2017, 68 are dated 2024 and 97 are dated 2025.

On the LDWA Hillwalkers' Register, Wainwrights table, updated 27 November 2025:

• 955 people are registered as having completed the 214.
• 714 are men and 241 are women, a 75 to 25 split.
• The earliest registered finish is Alan Barber, on 30 April 1966, the year the seventh book came out.
• 44 people registered a first finish in 2007, 43 in 2017, 8 in 2024 and 13 in 2025.
• Some people are on both registers, and nobody knows how many, so the totals can't be added together.
• Each register is a floor, not a count. You only appear if you send your finish in, and many people never do.

Where they finish

The two registers disagree on the most common last fell.

• On the Wainwright Society register, Great End comes first with 101 finishes, then Haystacks (88), Castle Crag (66), Scafell (65), Yewbarrow (53), Kirk Fell (47) and Lingmell (40).
• At random, each fell would get about 7.7 of the Society's 1,645 finishes. Great End gets thirteen times that.
• On the LDWA register, Castle Crag is the most common last fell, with 45 finishers. That is 4.7% of the LDWA's registered finishes, on the lowest fell in the list.
• If people picked their last fell at random, each would get about 4.5 of the LDWA's finishers. Castle Crag gets ten times that.
• On the LDWA register, the next most common are Slight Side (31), Yewbarrow (30), Great End (25), Lingmell (24), Haystacks (23), Binsey (19), Scafell (19), Lank Rigg (18) and Gowbarrow Fell (18).
• Those ten fells account for 252 finishes, about 26% of the LDWA register.
• The reasons are in our essay on where people finish the Wainwrights. Most of the other leading fells on both registers are Scafell and Wasdale fells that people walk past for years, which is the subject of the awkward leftovers.

Finishing together

• On the LDWA register, 911 entries give both a last fell and a full date. Of those, 296 (32%) share that exact fell and date with at least one other person on the register.
• Those joint finishes break down into 121 pairs, 7 groups of three, 2 groups of four, one group of 7 and one group of 18.
• On the Wainwright Society register, 696 of the 1,620 entries with a full date (43%) share their last fell and date with someone else. Most are pairs (311), with 14 groups of three, 4 of four, 2 of five and one of six.
• Each person registers separately, so a couple who finish together only count if both sign up. Both percentages are floors. The real share of shared finishes is higher.

Doing it again

• On the LDWA register, 133 of the 955 (14%) have completed more than one round. 61 have done two, and 27 have done three.
• The most rounds on the register is 61, by Stephen Moore.
• The Keswick Reminder covered his 60th round in September 2023. He was 75, finished on Latrigg, and had first completed in 1971. His fastest round took 23 days, and he had climbed Catbells 456 times.
• 216 people are on the LDWA's Outlying Fells register (116 fells), 118 on the Birketts (541), 116 on the Fellrangers (230) and 26 on the Synges (670), which the register added in 2025.

Speed records

Timings are from Fastest Known Time unless stated.

• Fastest round overall: John Kelly, 5 days 12 hours 14 minutes, finished 7 May 2022. grough's report on Kelly's record put his route at more than 515 km with around 36,000 m of ascent.
• Fastest woman: Sabrina Verjee, 5 days 23 hours 49 minutes, June 2021. Kelly was about 11 and a half hours faster.
• Steve Birkinshaw took 6 days 12 hours 58 minutes in June 2014. That broke Joss Naylor's 1987 record of 7 days 1 hour 25 minutes, according to Wikipedia's article on Steve Birkinshaw. Paul Tierney lowered it to 6 days 6 hours 5 minutes in 2019.
• The first continuous round was Alan Heaton's in 1985, in 9 days 16 hours 42 minutes (Wikipedia).
• Fastest self-supported: Tom Hollins, 8 days 9 hours 44 minutes, finished 28 February 2025. He ran it in winter and still beat James Forrest's summer self-supported time of 14 days 11 hours from 2020, according to grough's report on Hollins's round.
• Fastest unsupported: Christopher Gaskin, 11 days 10 hours 58 minutes, May 2021.
• Fastest winter supported: Carol Morgan, 8 days 1 hour 51 minutes, January 2025. James Gibson holds the men's winter supported time, 8 days 6 hours 44 minutes, from December 2021.

Most walkers take 10 to 20 years, and that is the normal way to do it. How long it takes to walk the Wainwrights covers the pace of an ordinary round.

The registers

• There are two public registers. The LDWA Hillwalkers' Register is open to anyone. The Wainwright Society keeps five registers for its members: the 214, the Outlying Fells, Limestone Country, the Howgills and the Coast to Coast.
• The Society asks for the names and dates of your first and last fells. It does not ask for proof.
• The Society charges £5 each for a certificate and a badge in the UK, or £10 each elsewhere, postage included.
• Both registers list completers by finish date. Neither ranks them.

When you reach 214, registering your completion takes a few minutes, as long as you know the name and date of your first fell. If you are partway through, write it down now. Over a round that can take ten years or more, it is an easy detail to lose.