A platform for weather, route and parking plans all in one place. An innovative new digital resource for hill and mountain walkers provides a convenient one-stop app for planning days out across the UK.
Hillcast, which launched this month on the App Store and Google Play, allows outdoors fans to check the weather forecast for thousands of significant hills, discover hiking routes and find the best parking spots – all in one place.
Hillcast is the brainchild of Scottish runner and skier Matt Burrows. He said: “Like everyone else who enjoys being in the UK hills and mountains, I would often spend many hours checking a variety of different resources for weather forecasts, as well as route guides and then trying to work out the best place to park for each outing.
“It would require a lot of cross-referencing – and even after all that I was still not always sure if it would be worth the drive.
“Then, one day I was running in the hills, and I suddenly thought, ‘What if there was a platform where I could see all this information in one place?’.
“The idea grew from there into Hillcast, which brings everything you need to plan a hill day into one place.”
Matt, who is a Perthshire-based bathroom fitter, has integrated forecast data from Open-Meteo for 2,150 significant hills, including well-known hill lists, the Munros, Corbetts, Donalds, Fionas, Marilyns, Wainwrights and Nuttalls.
Of the summits, 1,395 are in Scotland, 462 are in England and there are 293 in Wales.
At a glance, the app shows a weather forecast rating from zero to 100 – and up to seven days in advance.
Hillcast links to route guides on WalkHighlands and Wainroutes, plus it uses hill data from the Database of British and Irish Hills
Additionally, every hill also has directions to where people can park, whether a car park, layby or forestry track, rather than simply a postcode for the nearest village.
Matt said: “I have tried many different weather forecast platforms over many years of running, walking and skiing in the hills and I find Open-Meteo by far the most reliable.
“It draws on a number of models and picks the best available for each location, rather than any single source. The Hillcast forecast score is for every summit and takes in visibility, summit cloud and snow, as well as wind, rain and temperature.”
He added: “The app has taken a lot of hard work and time to design, including collating all the relevant information, checking and rechecking.
“Fortunately, I’m a bit of a digital geek and so I’ve enjoyed the process of it all.”
Hillcast is free forever for anyone joining now. It will always be free to mountain rescue teams.
Information on the app is constantly being updated and Matt is asking walkers to flag anything they think is incorrect, or where they discover new details, such as better places to park for each route.
Colin Watson, a keen hill bagger, has been testing the app. He said: "I particularly like having all of the information for a walk in one place, as opposed to having to consult a variety of sources when planning a day out.
“It's certainly much easier checking Hillcast than trawling through weather forecast sites. Each day I’ve been out, I’ve found the forecast to be very accurate."
