Ed Johnson-Williams

There’s a very high mountain in the Cairngorms in Scotland called “Sgor an Lochain Uaine”. It’s 1,258m above sea level. That makes it the 5th highest mountain in the UK. But as the whole of the Cairngorms is pretty high, it’s not much higher than the surrounding area.

I’ve also made a map of the UK mountains that are both high and higher than the surrounding area, if you just want to explore them.

Mountains that are higher than everything else around them are theoretically more likely to have better views at the top.¹

Prominence is a word in geography for how far you’d have to climb down from one summit before the land starts rising towards a higher summit.

Peaks with high prominence are higher than everything else in the area. Peaks with low prominence are usually a similar height to everything else in the area.²

Sgor an Lochain Uaine has quite a low prominence (118m), especially for its height of 1,258m. On the other hand, Ben More on the Isle of Mull in Scotland has a height and a prominence of 966m. It’s the highest mountain on the island, so you’d have to go all the way down to sea level before you could climb anything higher.

I haven’t climbed Ben More, but the view looks pretty good to me!

The UK Prominent Peak Database (now offline: 1st September 2026) listed peaks in the UK that were at least 500m above sea level and had a prominence of at least 100m. These criteria make it easier to find mountains that are both fairly high and stand out from the land around them.

The database categorised the peaks by prominence. P1000 means a prominence of 1000m+, P500 means 500m+ etc.

I’ve taken the UK Prominent Peak Database and added latitude/longitude, a Google Map link and an OpenStreetMap link for each mountain.

Here’s the map I made using the data. It’s a nice way to see where these higher and more prominent mountains are. You can use it to find mountains in a particular area.

Here are links to the datasets I’ve adapted from the UK Prominent Peak data.

• All GB: CSV / XLSX
• P1000 (prominence of 1000m+): CSV / XLSX
• P500: CSV / XLSX
• P200: CSV / XLSX
• P100: CSV / XLSX

I removed mountains in Northern Ireland. Unfortunately I couldn’t get my program to convert the OS map references for Northern Irish peaks into latitude/longitude, which I needed to make the map above. I also removed a few columns from the dataset that weren’t working any more.

There is another database called “Database of British and Irish hills” that seems to be updated regularly. It is extremely thorough (21,291 hills!) with data about peaks as low as just 2m above sea level! The website recommends an iOS app called Hill Lists and an Android app called British Hills as app-based ways of accessing and filtering this database.

Footnotes

1. This photo from the top of Sgor an Lochain Uaine makes the view seem well worth it in this case though! ↩

2. I’ve also seen the word “drop” used instead of prominence. ↩