The 20 Highest Settlements in England

If you want to pick a pub argument in the wrong part of the country, claim confidently that your favourite village is England's highest. Somebody will correct you. Somebody else will correct them. Three different places — Flash in Staffordshire, Nenthead in Cumbria, and Coalcleugh in Northumberland — have all worn the crown at various points, depending on which measure you use, which map you trust, and how charitable you feel about whether a row of farms really counts as a "village".

I've walked in all three. They share a certain quality that's hard to describe to anyone who hasn't been: the air is thinner in the best possible way, the sky is bigger than it has any right to be, and the wind carries the smell of wet bracken and sheep. These are lived-in places, but they're lived in on the margins, at the altitude where oak trees give up and the only things that thrive are grass, moss, and very determined people.

We have elevation data now for every settlement in our database: all 43,033 towns, villages and hamlets in England, Scotland and Wales. And for the first time, I can show you with some confidence what the 20 highest in England actually look like.

A note on measurement

Before the pedants arrive: elevation here is sampled at each settlement's stored central coordinate, using the Open-Meteo elevation dataset. That's usually a point within the main built-up area, a village green, a crossroads, the nearest thing that could reasonably be called a centre. It isn't the top of the parish, or the highest building, or the pub car park.

This matters because other lists sometimes quote a different figure for the same place. Our Flash comes out at 481 metres; the sign at the village reads 463. Our Princetown sits at 437 metres; the guide book says 435. The differences are small and the ranking is solid. Just don't bring this article to the next Flash parish meeting.

The trio at the top

1. Coalcleugh, Northumberland (506 m / 1,660 ft)

Our data puts Coalcleugh at the top, and it's not close. At 506 metres, it sits a full 24 metres above the next contender. Coalcleugh is in the North Pennines, up in the West Allen valley not far from Allenheads. If you've never heard of it, don't feel bad. It's a scatter of houses and a chapel where a lead-mining village once stood. At its height in the nineteenth century, several hundred people lived here, chasing galena ore through the hills in what must have been one of the most unforgiving working environments in Britain. When the mines closed, most of the people left. The altitude didn't.

Coalcleugh has a plausible but quiet claim to "England's highest inhabited place". Nobody seems to want to fight for it. Flash and Nenthead have the tourist boards and the signs; Coalcleugh has the altitude.

2. Flash, Staffordshire (481 m / 1,578 ft)

Flash is the famous one. It sits high in the Peak District, above the Staffordshire Moorlands, and its road sign proudly announces "Highest Village in England". The village has a church, a pub, and a scattering of cottages clinging to the hillside. It genuinely feels high: the views are enormous, the weather is rarely cooperative, and the verges are full of cotton grass and heather.

Flash's claim to "highest village" rests on being a proper parish with amenities, not just a few houses. If you prefer to define a village as somewhere with a population and a council, Flash wins. By raw altitude, it's third.

3. Nenthead, Cumbria (472 m / 1,549 ft)

Nenthead is the third corner of the great debate, and possibly the most photogenic of the three. It sits in the North Pennines AONB on the Cumbria/Northumberland border, another ex-lead-mining community, this one now partly restored as a heritage site. You can walk the Nent valley, see the remains of mine workings, and visit one of the most concentrated industrial landscapes in England, all at an altitude where most places long ago gave up on being inhabited.

Nenthead's case for "highest" rests on being a purpose-built village (the London Lead Company laid it out in the 1820s) with a clear centre. It's a reasonable claim. The people of Flash will disagree politely over a drink.

The North Pennines cluster

After those three, the rest of the top 20 is mostly a tour of the North Pennines and the dales that feed off them. This is a landscape shaped by lead, geology and weather: a high plateau of grass, bog and limestone where sheep farming and mining were, for centuries, the only games in town.

4. Harwood, County Durham (466 m). Upper Teesdale, not far from Cow Green Reservoir. Big skies, nesting curlews in spring, wild thyme in summer.

5. Blagill, Cumbria (445 m). A handful of stone cottages down the hill from Nenthead, strung along the old mining road to Alston.

6. Snaisgill, County Durham (442 m). Teesdale again, above Middleton. The name is Norse, which is a theme up here; these hills were settled by Norwegian and Danish farmers in the ninth and tenth centuries, and the place names still show it.

9. Allenheads, Northumberland (435 m). The proper village of the North Pennines. It has a pub, a shop, a chapel and a superb heritage centre telling the story of the Beaumont family, who ran the lead mines here for generations. If you're doing a driving tour of this article, start here. It's a good base, with roads fanning out up every surrounding valley.

11. Carrshield, Northumberland (432 m). Up the West Allen valley from Allenheads, a tiny hamlet strung out along the road.

12. Dirt Pot, Northumberland (427 m). The best-named settlement in this list, and possibly in England. Nobody seems entirely sure how it got the name; the most common theory is that the nearby stream ran brown with peat and iron, giving rise to "Dirten Pot" in old sources. It's a couple of houses and a stone bridge. Worth the detour for the name alone.

13. Boltshope Park, County Durham (424 m). In Weardale, another old mining community, now mostly farming.

15. Langdon Beck, County Durham (418 m). Possibly the most walker-famous name on this list. The Langdon Beck Hotel is a classic Pennine Way stopover. If you've done that long walk, you probably slept here, or at least had a bowl of soup on the way past. The village sits where the high Pennine roads start running out, and the landscape turns genuinely wild. Cauldron Snout and High Force are close by.

Yorkshire's highest corners

The Dales give us a smaller cluster, but one with disproportionate cultural weight.

8. Ravenseat, North Yorkshire (436 m). If you watch television, you already know Ravenseat. It's the farm of Amanda Owen, the Yorkshire Shepherdess, whose books and TV series brought upper Swaledale into the nation's living rooms. The farm itself is just that — a single working hill farm, with a handful of outbuildings. No shop, no pub. But it's 436 metres up, in a glorious fold of the high Pennines, and on a summer evening when the light goes long, it's one of the most beautiful places in England.

10. Hawks Stones, West Yorkshire (433 m). The West Yorkshire entry in the top 20 is a scattering on the moors above Todmorden, high on the Pennine ridge that separates the county from Lancashire. Bleak, handsome country that turns into gold in August when the heather comes out.

14. West Stonesdale, North Yorkshire (422 m). A hamlet above Keld in upper Swaledale, near the Tan Hill Inn. Tan Hill itself isn't in our dataset as a settlement (it's a single pub, albeit a famous one), but the inn is a kilometre or so from West Stonesdale and sits at roughly the same altitude.

16. Thorns, North Yorkshire (418 m). A cluster on the road between Ribblehead and Gearstones, in the shadow of Ingleborough.

20. Yockenthwaite, North Yorkshire (402 m). Langstrothdale, up near the head of Wharfedale. The name is Norse again, roughly "Eogan's clearing". There's a pack-horse bridge, a handful of farms, a stone circle on the hill above, and very little else. Perfect.

The Peak District outliers

17. Rockhill, Shropshire (412 m). A surprise entry; Shropshire isn't a county you associate with extreme altitude. Rockhill is up in the Clun Hills near the Welsh border, a reminder that England's southern uplands still get close to Pennine high ground.

18. Colshaw, Staffordshire (407 m). A Peak District neighbour of Flash, just down the ridge.

19. Grindsbrook Booth, Derbyshire (407 m). This one will be familiar to long-distance walkers. Grindsbrook Booth is part of Edale, at the southern end of the Pennine Way. Thousands of walkers set off from here every year to do the 268-mile slog north to Kirk Yetholm, and a good proportion of them have a bacon sandwich in Edale before they start. The village sits in a natural bowl with Kinder Scout looming above — the site of the 1932 mass trespass that eventually gave us the right to roam.

The Devon surprise

7. Princetown, Devon (437 m). The real outlier of the list. Princetown is in the middle of Dartmoor, and it exists largely because of HMP Dartmoor, the prison that was built in 1809 to hold French and American prisoners of war. It's the highest town in England south of the Pennines by a distance, and walking round its windswept streets on a wet February afternoon you feel a lot further north than you actually are. The Dartmoor Brewery is based here. If you've ever drunk Jail Ale, this is where it comes from.

Princetown is the only place in the top 20 that most visitors to England have actually heard of. The rest are, essentially, secrets hiding in plain sight at the top of the country.

What they have in common

Scroll back up that list and you'll notice something. Fifteen of the twenty are in the North Pennines or the Dales. Three are in the Peak District. One is on the Welsh Marches, one on Dartmoor. The English uplands are clustered: the vast bulk of the country is low-lying, and the few places where settlements get above 400 metres are the places where a handful of geological and industrial forces happened to coincide.

Almost all of these villages owe their existence to three things: sheep, minerals, and stubbornness. The lead-mining communities built themselves at altitudes that would otherwise have been abandoned to grouse and weather, because that's where the ore was. When the mines closed, most of the people left. But a few stayed. The houses were solid, the views were unbeatable, and there's a certain kind of person who, given the choice between a warm valley and a cold summit, will pick the summit every time.

If you've never been up in this country, go. Start at Allenheads, work your way across to Nenthead, drop down to Alston. Have lunch at the Langdon Beck Hotel if you can. Listen to the curlews. Get weather on you. It's the best that England does.

The full top 20

Elevation data sourced from Open-Meteo, sampled at each settlement's central coordinate. Filtered from 43,033 UK settlements to country = England, ranked by elevation in metres. Ties broken alphabetically.