Wainwright Completion Gifts — Ideas for Someone Who's Finished All 214

Finishing all 214 Wainwrights takes most people years. Some spread it across decades, fitting the Lake District around everything else. A few move quickly. The completion itself is usually underplayed: a quiet summit, a photograph, perhaps a pint. The scale of what it took tends to register later.

What Wainwright Recorded

Alfred Wainwright spent thirteen years walking the 214 fells and documenting them in the Pictorial Guides. Seven volumes, each fell given its own pages, routes described and drawn by hand. The guides are valuable precisely because they’re specific: Wainwright’s actual experience of each fell, the views he found, the routes he preferred. Not a general survey but a personal record of time spent in a particular place.

He never set out to write the definitive guide to the correct way up each hill. The books are an account of one man’s relationship with the Lake District.

The Same Fells, a Different Record

A map of someone’s completed Wainwright round works on the same principle, it’s specific to the person who made it. Not the fells as they exist in general, but the fells as this particular person walked them, on these days, by these routes.

All summits marked, the GPS tracks showing how each one was approached. The eastern fells done in a burst one Easter. The remote western ones ticked off over two separate trips three years apart.

A Map of Years in the Lakes

The Lake District is a place most Wainwright completers return to repeatedly. The map holds the shape of that: areas visited many times, long ridge days that covered a dozen summits at once, individual tops that warranted their own dedicated trips.

The map doesn’t record conditions or weather. But a glance at a particular section brings specific days back. That’s not something that can be bought ready-made.

Getting One Made

GPS data connects via Strava or uploads directly as GPX files. The map previews on screen before printing.

MunroMapping generates Wainwright maps from your GPS data. See examples and generate a preview at munromapping.co.uk.

The completion deserves something that lasts. A map of every walk is one way to mark it properly.