Method
How this site works out what it publishes
Four things on this site are worked out rather than read off a record, and each one is written down. They are not equal in size, so the share of the site each accounts for is stated beside it — the most elaborate method here is also the rarest, and a reader who met it first would get the wrong idea of the whole.
On-ground signage and temporary closures override this page. Always.
How a place gets onto this site Two ways, in very unequal measure
A register names it — 1,752 places, 94% of the site
The ordinary path. The state names registers publish the feature and this site enumerates it: 16 kinds of feature are recognised, of which some are looked for by name and the rest are published only where an official way turns out to reach them. Which kinds fall in which bucket is a decision the pipeline publishes rather than one this page holds, so both lists are on the sources and licences page beside the rules applied to them.
No method is needed to find these. They are on the site because a government register says they exist, and the work is entirely in the verdict below.
A terrain rule proposes it — 104 places, 6% of the site
Some waterfalls are real, visible in the published contours, and in no gazetteer and no feature layer at all. One rule reads elevation contours along mapped watercourses and proposes those, and it is the only thing on this site that publishes a place no register names. Every candidate it finds is published at statutory inference and labelled as a rule output on its own page.
It applies to falling water and to nothing else: no rule here proposes a lookout, a cave or a peak. How the waterfall rule works states its parameters and publishes how often it is wrong, including every parameter pair that was tried.
How the access verdict is computed Every place, however it got here
This is the method the site exists for, and it runs on all 1,856 places regardless of which path above brought them in. A verdict is a chain of records — cadastral parcels and their tenure, protected-area estate, road reserves, watercourses, published tracks, and the statutes that govern them — and every link carries the grade of the record it rests on. A chain publishes at the grade of its weakest link, and where the chain breaks the refusal is published instead of a route.
The four verdicts, the evidence grades, and the five things this site will never do are on the about page, because every page of the site links there for them.
How long a walk takes Every route that publishes one
Naismith's rule, applied to the route's own surveyed line and to the climb read off the published contour layer along that same line — never to a straight line between two points. It errs long on purpose, and the two places it declines to flatter a walk are named.
How long a walk takes gives the rates, the round-trip cap, and what the figure deliberately leaves out.