LiDAR Hillshade Map of England
Interactive terrain explorer using Environment Agency LiDAR data — compare standard mapping against a high-resolution shaded-relief layer that reveals field boundaries, trackways, and earthworks invisible on ordinary maps.
Drag the slider to compare the standard basemap (left) with the LiDAR hillshade layer (right). Use the search icon to jump to any UK postcode, street, or town.
Drop a marker or draw a circle to highlight a feature, then copy the link to share it — or just bookmark the page once placed. Shared links open with the slider a quarter of the way across, showing more of the hillshade, unless you've moved it yourself.
30,283 British hills detected directly from OS Terrain 50, confirmed and refined against 2 m LiDAR where available — an independent dataset, not matched against any existing hill list. Gold markers are Marilyns (≥150 m topographic prominence, 1,502); mid-brown are HuMPs (100–150 m, 1,342); dark brown are Tumps (30–100 m, 12,053). Green markers are Hills (15,386): local rises below the formal 30 m prominence line that still stand out as genuine landforms in their own right — the terrain drops away by a meaningful amount (25th-percentile relief) in most of 16 compass sectors within 1 km, and the summit stands clearly above its immediate (250–500 m) surroundings, not just above a distant valley belonging to a bigger ridge it happens to sit on.
Swaps the left-hand basemap for the Ordnance Survey 1900 County Series (six-inch-to-the-mile), so the slider now compares Victorian-era mapping directly against today's LiDAR hillshade instead of the modern basemap. This is the fastest way to tell whether a linear or earthwork feature visible in the terrain is a genuine historic feature — a filled-in field boundary, a lost trackway, ridge-and-furrow, a former building platform — that simply isn't marked on any current map, versus something more recent. Historic map tiles: © National Library of Scotland.
The map is a shaded-relief render, not a colour-by-height map — light is simulated from the north-west, so subtle rises and hollows such as field boundaries, hedge banks, and earthworks stand out as bright/dark edges.
Click anywhere on the map above to look up the OS Terrain 50 elevation for the 50 m grid square at that point.
- Elevation
- OS grid reference
- Sample area
- 50 × 50 m
- WKT bounding box
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Elevation is sampled from OS Terrain 50 (50 m resolution); the background relief shown on the map is derived from separate, much finer 2 m Environment Agency LiDAR data.
Use the slider in the middle of the map to reveal or hide the LiDAR hillshade layer on either side.
Tap the magnifying glass icon to open the search bar and enter any UK postcode, street, or city. On mobile, press the Return key on your keyboard to trigger the search.
Click anywhere on the map to look up the precise OS Terrain 50 elevation for that point. The hillshade layer is generated up to zoom 16 and remains sharp when zoomed in further to 18.
The hillshade layer was built from the Environment Agency's LiDAR Composite Digital Terrain Model (2 m resolution). The elevation data was oversampled 2× using bilinear interpolation to soften pixelation, then rendered as a single-direction shaded relief (north-west illumination, 45° altitude) to maximise the visibility of subtle surface features.
The click-to-look-up elevation figure uses a separate, coarser dataset — the Ordnance Survey Terrain 50 50 m grid — which covers all of Great Britain, not just England.
Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Environment Agency LiDAR data and OS Terrain 50 data © Crown copyright and database rights 2026.
Because it strips away colour and texture and lights the ground from a single fixed direction, hillshading exaggerates surface relief far beyond what's visible on a standard map or aerial photo. Subtle rises of only a few centimetres — the raised outline of a ploughed-out field system, the ditch and bank of an Iron Age enclosure, ridge-and-furrow from medieval strip farming, or the earthworks of a deserted settlement — throw just enough shadow at this resolution to become clearly visible. This makes the map a genuinely useful starting point for local history and archaeology research, alongside its more conventional uses.
The underlying LiDAR data also resolves the everyday texture of the landscape in detail: field boundaries and hedge banks, sunken lanes and trackways, quarry and mineral workings, and the shape of river valleys carved by erosion through the Pennines and other upland areas of England.
Whether you're researching the history of a local field, planning a walking route, or simply curious about the terrain beneath a familiar landscape, this map offers an accessible starting point. For elevation figures across the rest of Great Britain, use the click-to-look-up tool above, which draws on the coarser OS Terrain 50 dataset.