About

Exploring Peaks lists places to stay in Britain's mountain country, and pairs each of them with what you can reach from the door: the walks, the viewpoints, the nearest crag or zip line.

There is no shortage of places to book a cottage. What is missing is anyone joining the two halves up. Cottage sites know their inventory and nothing about the hills. Walking sites know the hills and send you to a booking site that knows nothing about the walk. Sitting between the two is the whole idea.

What this is not

Not a route-finding service. Not a conditions service. Not a substitute for a map, a forecast, or your own judgement about whether today is the day. Route distances, ascent and difficulty here are planning figures from published sources, for deciding whether a day is realistic before you book, and nothing on the site is updated often enough to tell you what the weather or the snow is doing.

Not a personal blog either. We do not write "I climbed this last spring" about routes nobody here climbed last spring. Where a page states a fact, it came from a published source or from the merchant's own listing, and the page says which.

Who writes this

Nobody, by name. Exploring Peaks carries no bylines, because no single person checked all of this, and a site that invents one who did is doing the thing this site exists to avoid.

What every page carries instead is where its facts came from. Ordnance Survey for heights and grid references. The landowner or the national park for access and history. The operator for trains, buses and lifts. The merchant's own listing for anything about a property, with the date somebody last read it. If a page cannot name a source for something, the page does not say it.

That does not make the site neutral. It has views about which base to pick first, which path is busiest on a Saturday, and which walk to do on a Tuesday instead. Every one of those comes with the reason attached, so you can disagree with it on the evidence rather than on our word.

Coverage

Four regions to start with: the Lake District, Eryri (Snowdonia), the Peak District and Scotland. Those are the four with enough places to stay to be worth doing properly. The Alps come later, and only when the British side is genuinely finished rather than merely started.

How it pays for itself

Booking links earn a commission from the merchant. It costs you nothing and it does not shape what gets listed or what a page says about a property. The one thing it touches is which merchant goes on the main booking button when a property is listed by more than one, and that is decided on the depth of the merchant's catalogue in the region rather than on the rate. In Scotland it means leading with the merchant that pays the least of the three, because it carries roughly four times the Highland stock of the merchant with the best rate.