(SIGNIFICANT SUMMITS)

A LazyMap of the Marilyns of Lowland Britain

The main diagram, below, is a lazymap of the lowlands of Britain designed to show only the relationship of the summits and cols of the Relative Hills of [Lowland] Britain, as per Dawson's Relative Hills of Britain -- that is the southern three quarters of Britain, which contain only a third of the British Marilyns that Dawson lists.

The underlying grid is the National Grid of the Ordnance Survey (Great Britain), and the overall map is only a collage of the silver grid squares -- the name of each image file corresponds to the respective OS 100km grid square, e.g. SH.png covers all and only the OS(GB) National Grid square with reference SH.  The same 100km grid is the one shown on the smaller map of The Isles, below right.

The only other contents of the map are:

• a triangle representing each Marilyn summit, i.e. each hill with a relative height or prominence of 150m -- a metric rounding-off from the imperial 500ft = 152.4m ;
• a small square representing the lowest intervening col between each pair of summits linked along the watershed ;
• the triplepoints where the interconnecting ridges of the above meet ;
• and straight-line approximations of those ridges linking all the above as appropriate.

Of course, in reality any given ridge might instead zigzag wildly or follow an exaggerated arc -- the point of these ridges is not their precise journey, but where they begin and end.

A dotted boundary is drawn to indicate where off-shore Marilyns exist, and that they are not shown floating separately from the main body (or perhaps we should call it a skeleton) in error.  The dots should not be taken to indicate the size or shape of the island.  Islands with no Marilyns are absent from the map.

All summits with a relative height of 300m or more, and the lowest col between each, are shown in red.  All other summits, cols, and all `ridges' are colour-coded according to regional groups.

These regions, [as indicated on the map of The Isles to the right] are defined such that each boundary col is the lowest col between the highest (and most prominent) summits of any two regions (not necessarily the pair that this col links / separates).  All summits linked by contiguous ridges on the same side of those boundary cols are members of the same region, as are islands that were similarly linked when the tide was out far enough, i.e. during or `soon' after the last ice-age and presumably will be again come the next one!

Tables of the most prominent summits in each of these regions (and the other regions not shown on the lazymap) are linked from the Significant Summits home page.  The regions shown here may be broadly defined as follows:

1:  Greater Cambria -- Wales and the Welsh Marches 2:  South-West Peninsula -- the Moors of the far south-western corner of England 3:  Downlands -- the Downs and Wolds of southern and central England 4:  Central Britain -- the Pennines and Cumbrian Mountains and outlying peaks, also includes the Isle of Man 5:  Southern Uplands -- lowland Scotland, and England north of Hadrian's Wall BEYOND -- The southern fringe of the Highlands and outlying islands

(Note:  I have also put up an annotated lazymap of just Greater Cambria, labelling the most prominent summits and their respective cols.)

Just to the north of where the lazymap ends, the Scottish Highlands are so densely packed with Marilyns that to attempt to display them, their cols, and connecting ridges on this scale would be futile -- viz 295 Marilyns and 302 cols in the NN gridsquare, (Dawson).  In any event my personal research on the Highlands is generally restricted to hills of 400m prominence or more.

The silvered-out areas correspond [roughly] to where other grid systems take priority -- notably the Irish Grid to the west, by which all the Irish peaks in the relevant tables are referenced.

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© Alun Fisher 2003