When I was visiting Lanarkshire in Scotland many years ago, I went up a mountain called Tinto. It is said (or so I was told at the time) that any height above Tinto (about 2300 ft) is called a mountain and anything below that height is called a hill.
Now this may be complete tosh, a local saying, or totally true (perhaps only in Scotland) but it got me thinking about when a hill becomes a mountain.
I’ve done a lot of hill/mountain walking and I always thought the Hugh Grant film ‘The guy who went up a hill and came down a mountain’ and its 1000ft limit was total BS. I wait to be convinced otherwise.
I’ll look for the cite, but in an older–but peer-reviewed–article I recently read it was stated that a “Mountain” requires 2000 feet of local relief (as opposed to absolute elevation above sea level).
However, as a Geologist I just shrug and say “that’s something to let the Geographers fight about.”
I’d have to throw in my observation that any definition would have to require measurement from the base, not sea level (as Pantellerite’s comment and pravnik’s link indicated). By prow|er’s proposed definition, my parking lot is a mountain.
← see location, aka “The mile (1.6 km) high city”.
Of course, if pointy tops at 5200 feet qualifies something as a mountain, I have a new nick-name for a couple of managers at work
