About

A cairn is a pile of stones on a summit. Every walker who passes adds one. Nobody builds it, and it gets built anyway.

Cairn Press makes contour prints of British hills. Each one is drawn from Ordnance Survey elevation data — the real shape of the real ground, not an illustrator’s idea of a mountain. Fine contour lines carry the shape, every fourth one drawn a little heavier so you can count your way up, with a soft shaded relief beneath them so the hill lifts off the paper. The summit is marked with a small triangle and its height.

Above the name sit eleven ridgelines: slices through the ground around the summit, taken west to east and stacked far to near, so you see the hill side-on as well as from above. It reads as a shape from across the room and as a map when you walk up to it.

What you get

Contour artwork printed on 250 gsm acid-free museum-quality matte paper, in Ivory (dark lines on warm off-white) or Midnight (pale lines on deep navy). Choose 30 × 40, 50 × 70 or 70 × 100 cm.

Every print is made to order by our print partner, Gelato. Standard UK delivery is included in the price. See our Delivery page for delivery information.

The paper is 0.29 mm thick, naturally off-white and uncoated, with a quiet matte surface. Every print is supplied unframed, ready for a frame of your choice.

The hills

We are starting with the ones people actually stand on. Ben Nevis, Scafell Pike, Yr Wyddfa, Helvellyn. Alongside them the ones that reward the walk in — Beinn Eighe under its pale quartzite screes, Ben Macdui alone in the middle of the Cairngorm plateau.

More are on the way. There are 282 Munros and 214 Wainwrights, and we'd like to draw all of them.

One hill in particular

In 1774 the Astronomer Royal, Nevil Maskelyne, chose Schiehallion in Perthshire to weigh the Earth. Its isolation and near-symmetrical ridge made the gravitational pull of the mountain measurable against a plumb line.

To do the arithmetic, the surveyor Charles Hutton had to work out the mountain's volume — so he took the survey heights and joined the points of equal elevation with lines.

It was one of the first times contour lines were used to map a hill, and it was done to weigh the world. Everything we make goes back to that idea.

Get in touch

Send us a message through the contact page. We answer everything, usually the same day.