Points of Contact: On the Practice, Philosophy, and Pleasures of Fell Walking

By Mick Harney

Are you passionate about walking and climbing, perhaps in areas such as Scotland and the English Lake District? Or do you simply have a curiosity about those activities and those places? Points of Contact is the book for you.

Knitting geology, history, and meteorology into an illuminating exploration of the world of fell and hill walking, it is by turns descriptive, humorous, and poetic.

Points of Contact reveals that you may have stayed at the Sybarites' Base without realizing it or suffered under the Spartan Assumption but not known it by that name. Small hills might not interest you, yet you should read about the Bonsai Peaks to know what you are missing. What has Scotland's An Teallach got that Everest hasn't? How is Franz Kafka relevant to mountaineering and what is a 'Bad K-Sequence'? Would you like to discover the hidden and inner significance of walking kit and equipment?

In considering these and other questions, Points of Contact draws on Mick Harney's years of mountain exploration to create a seamless and entertaining whole exploring the multi-faceted world of fell and hill walking. This book provides vivid insights into the hill and mountain experience, articulating fresh and thought-provoking perspectives upon its deeper meanings.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mick Harney
• Release date: Jul 11, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465748119

Mick Harney

Mick Harney is a writer, photographer, and walker. His books on fell and hill walking spring from over 35 years exploring the fells of the English Lake District and the mountains of Scotland. He previously completed two full rounds of the 214 hills in Cumbria famously catalogued by Alfred Wainwright. He has summited over 100 of the Scottish mountains above 3000 feet known as Munros. Mick's passion for the wilder places, and fascination about our interactions with them, has also led him to investigate, and exclusively reveal, the true story of that most profound of human explorations, the quest for the South Pole. His poetry has been published in the magazines Dragon, Knee-Deep, and TaC, and won awards in the Lancaster Lit Fest and Vers Poets competitions. He was short-listed for the 2010 Bridport prize. His selected poems are published as Stitches in Time.

Book preview

Forward

No need for introductions, as I think we've already met. You bumped into me in the Lake District on your way to St Sunday Crag having come across from Red Screes above Kirkstone. My path crossed with yours in Scotland as we discussed the weather prospects on Ben More's east ridge. We've compared favourite mountains in the walkers bar at the Inveroran Hotel, offered a lift back to the car park after Ben Lawers, shared our routes to the top of Ard Crags, and recommended a scramble on Yewbarrow. There you are, you see, no need for formalities. Even if you feel we haven't met, perhaps because you have an interest in these matters but haven't taken foot to fell, the same informality applies. Except for a few surly curmudgeons, who I'd hesitate to include in the kinship anyway, I have never known a lover of the fells, of whatever stripe, to be rebuffed by another.

Unless I'm very much mistaken, you share with me an intimate relationship with, and joy in, the mountains – large and not so large. We are those who love a summit, but do not need to be there first; we do not require danger to be fulfilled, though don't decline a measure of excitement. It is likely we refer to the Scottish Mountaineering Club (SMC) guide books; it is unlikely we rock climb seriously enough to be SMC members. For such as us, climbing our Wainwrights or Munros or whatever, the specific focus is on the mountains of Cumbria and the high places of Scotland.

Our personal link with those peaks and their landscapes is defined by our one-on-one experience of particular mountains. We each then have a unique path through those experiences. And it is not just the places. It is also enormously about with whom you share those places and times, in success and failure, in comfort and pain, and in later reflection, conversation, and more than just a few laughs along the way. Points of Contact articulates, reflects on, and shares the findings I've made on my particular path, with my particular people, in the desire that some of it, at least, chimes meaningfully with you.

Points of Contact does not proceed in a simplistic, linear chronology. As I wrote, what emerged was a collection of themes. They made a better fit with how true life felt. That is, what resonated for me were not occurrences in isolation but experiences that found echo and reinforcement in different places and times across the years. My method of bringing those themes to you is to build up layers of evocation and multiple perspectives. Hence, inside, you will find three types of section, which I label as Pieces, Dendrochronology, and Kitbag.

Pieces are the most substantive chapters and consider different aspects of the mountains and of fell walking. The Dendrochronology series examines the reactions and attitudes of other writers exploring the Lakeland fells from the 17th century to the present. Each Kitbag takes a piece of walking equipment as a catalyst for observations on otherwise unarticulated facets of the craft. My purpose in having sections with these different perspectives is to do justice to the subject's diversity. Although individual sections are self-contained, and can be read in isolation, I hope you will find richer perspectives emerge from their accumulation.

By this accretion, I trust to implicitly provide my answer to the old question: 'Why do you want to climb a mountain?' Rheinhold Messner, the first person to reach the summit of all fourteen of the eight thousand metre mountains in the world, is perhaps uniquely qualified to respond to that question and to my mind does so in the passage I quoted at the start of the book. Mallory's famously laconic reply, 'Because it's there', has a brevity that I can't match, but then I judge such brevity does not capture the case that needs presenting. Since we have already met, I hope you won't object if my ambition with Points of Contact is not only to present my own case but also that which is common to us all.

In scrambling and rock climbing, there is an essential rule when moving up a steep and exposed face: 'Maintain three points of contact at all times.' One limb at a time is left free to move forward and in that movement one progresses onward to the next stance.

oooO0Oooo

Part One: At the Heart and at the Edge

Wasdale

Wast Water appears a narrow lake. So narrow, you feel you can skip a stone across to the screes below Illgill Head, given a strong enough arm and a flat enough stone. It is its cut that is profound. Seventy six metres is two hundred and fifty feet deep. Except for those few in the preternaturally gouged valleys of the Alps, Wast Water is the deepest lake in Europe south of Copenhagen and west of Warsaw. Search along its latitude to find a deeper deep. You discover yourself 300 miles further west, beyond Ireland, where the continental shelf dives into the true Atlantic.

Wait a moment though, memory suggests. Isn't that wrong? Isn't Europe also home to a handful of Scottish lochs that are deeper than Wast Water? Yes, this is true: some lochs are deeper than Wast Water. But I was not wrong. What memory did not contain is that even southerly Loch Lomond is still north of Copenhagen. All of the highlands, their mountains and lochs, are north of Copenhagen. What we recall, and what we fail to, can skew to favour our intuitively held version of the world rather than to assert the sometimes odder perspective of facts.

Lu and I were reminiscing the other night about our times in Kephallonia and Kos, some 15 years ago. Stories got retold, images of Mertos Beach and Fiskaro reinvoked, that trip up the coast in the Peter Peter re-enacted. But, who was on board that day? Who was with us in the villa Agios Stephanos? Was it Kephallonia or Kos where I had a shaggy red beard for the first and only time in my life? Which was it when my head was shaved and Ian’s beard was shaped like a house brick? At least Steve’s insomnia authored mnemonic was precise: Donkeys, Discos, and Dogs, will always remind me of Kos. Could our memories be relied on to distinguish one sunny, pebbly beach from another? We began to find we could not.

There is a different mixture of place and remembering than that. With some places, the reiterated memories grow together, alchemically, creating as evocative an amalgam as flour, yeast, and salt kneaded and baked or a bed of slate peppered with trilobites. In the first case, disparate components combine into a new and separate form. In the second, an otherwise homogenous body is punctuated by nuggets in and of themselves whole and discrete.

Where the Nether Wasdale to Wasdale Head road is joined by the road from Gosforth, a rocky outcrop juts out towards the deeps of Wast Water. No one has given it a name. The Ordnance Survey horseman passed by bestowing only what sounds like a rather puzzled ‘Landing Stage’. Not so much a name as a guess at function. Even the usually definitive Alfred Wainwright doesn’t name it, doesn’t even draw it. This is odd because, if a postcard is a commercialised memory, the view from this spot is the most valuable memory in The Lake District. There can be few postcard racks in Cumbria that do not have the picture: the mountain trio of Yewbarrow, Great Gable, and the Scafell massif reflected in Wast Water, taken from our anonymous landing stage. In a neat way, each evokes and visualises a type of memory, a type of history. Yewbarrow, palaeontology, with its Stegosaurus humped back; Great Gable, archaeology, with its classic pyramid shape; the Scafell massif, geology, with its peaceful, placid face disguising its violently volcanic roots in Borrowdale granite.

We simply pass through history, that is history. The first time I stood on the landing stage was in 1983, an experience two years prior to that of Kephallonia. Standing next to me were two friends, Stewy and Nige. A group, captured on a small and slightly fading photograph, ready to climb Great Gable the following day from the Wasdale Head campsite, for Nige and I the first time on Gable or on any fell. Now, we have been friends for nearly 25 years. Sam and I were there on our honeymoon in 1996, for Sam the first time she would climb Gable after three previous attempts thwarted by weather. We were there with Stewy, Nige, and Stewy's partner Val again in 2000, having come in from the Bowers House Inn in Eskdale, for Stewy to finally complete his round of the Wainwright fells. By chance, his last fell was Buckbarrow, which overlooks the Wast Water landing stage. In 1983 he was a trainee accountant, in 2000 Leader of Cumbria County Council. No fate but that which we make.

I am intrigued by these connections and collections. Recollection is not linear. I recall the experiences I invoke above haphazardly, I do not recall them along a chronological line. However, the experiences pass through the same point and that point is the landing stage on Wast Water, outside of time.

From there, like a giant experiment in perspective, Wast Water draws the eye like a diagrammatic arrow straight to Gable and the other mountains at the core of Wasdale. The eye is easily seduced. But, almost from the first, more seductive to my mind, and more provocative to my imagination, were The Screes, sloping below the double-humped ridge of Whin Rigg and Illgill Head across the narrow waist of Wast Water. An itch of curiosity started in me in 1983, a question about if and when and how.

It snuck up on me from another direction. Vicky and I were in a cottage at Ulpha late in 1990, deep in the southern fells. A cold and clear day foretold, we were looking for a new fell to climb. With a shock of revelation, I realised that the northern terminator of Wainwright's Southern Fells was Wast Water. One could complete a walk over Whin Rigg and Illgill Head by returning along the eastern shore among The Screes themselves.

In that way your mind falls into blinkered habits, mine conceived Wasdale in the loop of a lasso whose line began at Carlisle, ran through West Cumbria, and formed its knot at Gosforth. To have no conception of it from the south wasn’t just apparently naïve, it was literally naïve.

Wainwright records 214 individual fells, grouped in seven geographical areas. When I first knew the fells, I experienced them as separate mountains, isolated islands of experience. The shadows on the horizon had no names, the relationships between them unknown. As time passed, I slowly populated the family trees. A long ridge walk over many fells was like a wedding where you finally met the mothers and fathers, nieces and nephews, uncles and aunts, and found out for yourself who were the black sheep. Time engineered a gradual and satisfying accumulation of experience and recognition. There was an apotheosis of sorts in late 2000, on a clear day on top of Rannerdale Knotts in Buttermere, when I could wheel through 360° and name each fell from a personal meeting, from Low Fell in the north to Great Gable in the south.

There at last on the Whin Rigg-Illgill Head ridge above The Screes in 1990, an omen. The shutter of my Nikon F301 failed, blinding the camera. The memories recorded so far had been of sun-swept and cloud-shadowed fells, glowing in the clear air of an icy wind. Now, there would be darkness.

Sometimes descent can be as protracted as ascent. Twilight was imminent when we finally descended past Wasdale Head Hall Farm to the lake, still four miles from the car with The Screes in between. With a deceptive simplicity, the Ordnance Survey map showed a clear path all the way back. As we headed west, the light faded at the same pace as the illumination grew of just how deceptive.

The definition of scree is also deceptive. Scree: an accumulation of rock fragments at the foot of a cliff or hillside, often forming a sloping heap. In many a fell walker’s lexicon, this is accompanied by: See Scream. These rock fragments can vary in size from a pea-sized pebble to a car-sized slab, with every possible shattered, mixed, and tumbled variation in between. You can descend some scree like a surfer descending a wave. You might have to ascend up similar scree: that experience is akin to pounding your boots shin deep into a rocky liquid on a down escalator. But, this evening, we weren’t descending or ascending, we were traversing. What could be malevolent about that?

In small, pebbly scree, the path started clear, 20 metres above the lake. Each footfall we took west, the scree gradually and consistently grew in size, the path gradually and consistently faded, and so did the light. As though responding to the increasing weight of the rocks, and to the now 40° cant of the slope, the path dropped closer and closer to the water until, in the near darkness, finally running out of land, it disappeared.

I was suddenly very conscious that this same 40° scree slope continued uninterrupted until it reached the lake bed those 76 metres below. There was an oppressive sensation of unseen forces wanting you down and under. Over the lake, there was a sort of no-man’s land between the dusk and the water. In equal measure, morale, energy, and pleasure were spent. Our last hour was a grim, stumbling scramble to negotiate each step through the remaining boulder field and finally emerge, no dignity intact, back at the road.

It’s a curiosity that – at least in retrospect – such experiences enrich and reward just as much as the glorious days of easy striding along a high ridge among postcard-pretty views. In many ways, a memory earned from a hard experience offers more for the mind to chew on. I think the reason we learn little from an easy experience is because it doesn’t challenge the understanding we had beforehand. Hitting your limits is another matter. I think of the moments when humility has flowered and the names I know those moments by sound like the names of battles: Carn Mor Dearg arête, Five Sisters Ridge, the retreat from Sail Liath, Crannach Wood, the West Wall Traverse.

The West Wall Traverse returns me to Wasdale. You encounter this traverse on a route between Scafell Pike and Scafell, the two highest mountains in England. It is another of those points where experiences separated in time co-exist. I was there in 1986 with Stewy and Nige for my first ascent of the Scafells. I was there with Sam in 1996 for her first ascent of the Scafells. I like the symmetries. On both occasions, the start was at Wasdale Head.

In 1986, we camped at the Wasdale Head campsite, scene of our original visit in 1983. In 1996, we came in from Scalelands Cottage near Cleator Moor, a place perched at the end of Ennerdale that was to become a regular home. On both occasions, the finish was celebrated at the Wasdale Head Hotel, with differing degrees of pleasure induced by the passage of time and the equivocal nature of change.

Wainwright’s books describe routes up the mountains and describe routes between the mountains. The route up is referred to as the Piers Gill route. The route between Scafell Pike and Scafell references Lord’s Rake and the West Wall Traverse. The combination is superlative and is one of the few lines through the Lake District that compare with the rocky drama and scale of the best Scottish mountains.

Having ascended Scafell Pike, you make your way gently downhill over flat ground to Mickledore, the col between Scafell Pike and Scafell. A mountain rescue box serves as a visual exclamation mark to emphasise the abrupt and seemingly impregnable rock face that now separates you from Scafell. This is Broad Stand. Although this is not a rock climb of any severity, and a skilled scrambler can ascend it without a rope, the knowledge that part of the way is wryly known as ‘fat man’s agony’ tends to dissuade. Casting my tyro eye over it in 1986 simply caused my stomach to jump, though there were no climbers en route to work on my imagination. There were climbers in 1996, but while we were there they retreated, clanking with ironware and irritably muttering about returning to the car.

As apprentices, Nige and I put ourselves in Stewy’s care. He stepped off north, down a soberingly steep and crumbling slope hard against the rock, and brought us to the nearly vertical gully of Lord’s Rake. When Sam and I followed in Stewy’s footsteps ten years later, the crumble of rock had virtually vanished and the surface had eroded to a slippery smear, inducing an even greater sense of insecurity.

Lord’s Rake is a cut in the rock of Scafell. Deep, gloomy, claustrophobic and filled with wet scree and boulders. It is time to fall on all fours and scramble upwards. A massive boulder partway up propels you into a shuffling, sideways, crab-like scuttle. Stewy and Nige pulled ahead of me, as did Sam years later with her superior poise past the boulder. In 1986, the start of the West Wall Traverse was obscure and I had to root around for the others to find it. By 1996, usage had cut it into clarity.

That first time, it was the immediacy of the contrasting experiences, from one side of a few seconds