Updates
The survey changes as new data lands and review time allows — and its climb count goes down as well as up, because a measurement that fails scrutiny is retired, not quietly patched. What changed, newest first:
2026-08-21 — One survey, per-country structure — and settled licensing
The UK survey moved to howsteep.org/uk/ (old links redirect) and the front page now introduces the survey as a whole, with the United States (New England first) in preparation. Licensing settled and published: any individual climb's page and charts are CC BY 4.0, the dataset is ODbL 1.0, and every downloadable climb document now states its licence. The methodology page now documents how the numbers are policed — the masks, the post-batch detector battery, and the human review that adjudicates every flag.
2026-08-20 — Measurement-integrity audit — the climb count went down
A corpus-wide audit retired roughly 95 pages whose headline measurements failed scrutiny (route lines off the carriageway, masked-structure artifacts, roads newer than the elevation survey beneath them) and re-sited 156 routes onto the Ordnance Survey road centreline. 1,500 climbs live. Retirements are public policy: an error we published and caught is removed, not quietly patched.
2026-08-19 — Great-Britain-wide re-pick — 798 pages
The page-selection rules were re-applied across every measured road in Great Britain, growing the site from 523 to 798 pages (England 221→411, Wales 210→272, Scotland 51→59) and rescuing climbs earlier versions had wrongly excluded, Honister Pass among them. Area labels reworked to name where each climb starts.
2026-08-18 — Northern Ireland joins — all four nations measured
Northern Ireland's open river-basin LiDAR reaches roughly a quarter of its roads — enough to measure Belfast's steepest streets, not yet the Antrim coast. Six pages at launch, measured the same way as everywhere else.
2026-08-17 — Scotland launches on a growing record
49 climbs from Scotland's open LiDAR patchwork (the national programme is capturing the rest of the country through 2027). Published exactly what the open record supports — a famous missing hill is almost always waiting for data, not judgement.
2026-08-16 — England launches
212 English climbs measured from Environment Agency LiDAR join the survey after the bulk-tile campaign.
2026-08-13 — Recognition, provisional names and the report form
Climb pages now show which books, championships and road signs match each measurement — recorded as evidence and tested, never copied. Machine-suggested names are marked provisional (°), and a no-account-needed report form collects signs, names, gates and corrections.
2026-08-12 — howsteep.org goes live — the Wales survey
257 Welsh climbs, every gradient stated with its measuring distance, born from one contradictory road sign above Aberystwyth.