Fell

The term is most often employed in Fennoscandia, Iceland, the Isle of Man, parts of northern England, and Scotland.

[1] It is cognate with Danish fjeld, Faroese fjall and fjøll, Icelandic fjall and fell, Norwegian fjell with dialects fjøll, fjødd, fjedd, fjedl, fjill, fil(l), and fel,[2] and Swedish fjäll, all referring to mountains rising above the alpine tree line.

Today, generally, "fell" refers to the mountains and hills of the Lake District and the Pennine Dales.

[4][5] Professor of geography at the University of Bergen, Anders Lundeberg, has summed up the problem by stating, "There simply is no fixed and unambiguous definition of fjell.

There are however dialectal differences in usage, with comparatively low mountains or plateaus, sometimes tree-covered, in Bohuslän and Västergötland (e.g. Safjällets nationalpark [sv] and Kynnefjäll [sv]) being referred to as "fjäll", similar to how the word is used in Norwegian [citation needed] In Finnish, the mountains characteristic of the region of Lapland are called tunturi (plural: tunturit), i.e. "fell".

The term tunturi is also generally used to refer to treeless plains at high altitudes in far north regions.

[citation needed] The term förfjäll (literally "fore-fell") is used in Sweden and Finland[14] to denote mountainous zones lower and less dissected than the fell proper.

However, its more pronounced relief, its often higher amount of plateaux, and its coherent valley systems distinguishes the förfjäll also from the undulating hilly terrain (bergkullsterräng) and the plains with residual hills (bergkullslätt).

As a geomorphic unit, the förfjäll extends across Sweden as a 650 km-long and 40 km to 80 km-broad belt from Dalarna in the south to Norrbotten in the north.