The Mountains of Ireland
What is an Irish mountain?
Traditionally, a "mountain" in Ireland would only have been classified as a proper mountain if its summit was at least 2,000 feet above sea level. While most hillwalkers and mountaineers have now moved on to embrace the metric system, we have decided to respect this particular summit listing tradition by recognising 2,000 feet as the minimum height of a proper Irish mountain. Sometimes the old traditions are the best, so why mess with them?
The list of Irish mountains below was created by combining two separate and long-established third-party summit lists (the Dillons and the Irish Hewitts) both of which were compiled in the 1990s using the traditional 2,000 feet lower height limit. These two lists are very similar (200 summits feature in both), but their secondary selection criteria have produced several differences. The combined lists comprise a total of 221 mountains in Ireland.
A third earlier list, the 'original' Vandeleur- Lynam list from 1956, was also compiled using the traditional 2,000 feet lower height limit. The original version of that list has fallen by the wayside in recent years, however its formal inclusion here would not have raised the overall mountain total beyond 221. Its modernised metric version has a very low 15m prominence criteria, which is well below the UIAA recommendation of 30m. For this reason, we cannot promote the modernised Vandeleur-Lynam list as a true mountain list.
All three of the original Irish mountain lists used the same 2,000 feet criteria. Other organisations are attempting to artificially increase the number of Irish mountains by metricising and lowering the traditional 2,000 feet limit. In reality, if an Irish summit wasn't a mountain in the 20th century, it's still not a mountain in the 21st (unless a professional survey proves otherwise).
Mountain summits offer great walking opportunities all year round, however we particularly recommend visiting them during months when the days are longest. For this reason, we promote upland walking as our monthly theme for June.
#JuneUplandWalk
All-Ireland map
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Each marker on the map represents the location of a mountain summit in Ireland. Click on a marker for further information about that location.
All the summit locations marked on this map have also been listed in height order below. |
Listed by height
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