Contour Lines: On the Path to a Thousand Mountains

By Mick Harney

Mick Harney returns with more unique perspectives on fell and hill walking in Scotland and the English Lake District. He offers a fresh crop of new and compelling insights, including many detailed descriptions of individual mountains, the paths we take to them, and what they reveal to and about us.

Contour Lines contains significant exclusives. Newly unearthed facts and a reinterpretation of the critical moments in Coleridge and Wordsworth’s Lake District trek in 1799 exposes the inside story of how Coleridge really became the prototypical fell-walker. The never-before revealed trip-ups Alfred Wainwright made when mapping the boundary of his Lakeland guide lead to intriguing psychological insights into the man and his creation.

There is much to appeal to any lover of the hills. Are you an experienced and passionate walker but tied to a city life? Then you should read about the ‘urban peakeys’ and see whether their realities and rewards match your own. Have you ever encountered oddly out-of-place people in the mountains, ill-suited for the environment but bizarrely present in the most wild and dangerous of spots? Check out the accounts of some classic waifs and strays.

Running throughout is an account of the inevitable absurdities and sometime successes of Mick’s journey to complete his round of the Wainwrights. You are with him as he travels towards the hoped-for goal, bagging the fells he still needs but taking care to respect and learn from each fell as he goes. In little Helm Crag’s case, reflecting on its geology, the shape of its parts, and the challenge its summit presents sharpens understanding of the wider world of mountaineering and illuminates an individual’s walking history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mick Harney
• Release date: Jul 15, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465820525

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

Section 1 – Journey and Route

Approaching Malham

Almost without exception, the route I take to reach my family’s home town of Skipton concludes with the stretch of the A65 heading west over the moorland from Addingham. That way, I pass Chelker Reservoir, where remnants of a fence I helped build in 1977 remain, now partitioning fields near wind turbines where once it delineated the boundaries of buried water mains.

Beyond Chelker, the road twists over a final rise before beginning its final descent into Skipton. The horizon expands. Marking the northern perimeter of the town, and the beginning of the dales, rise the twin peaks of Sharp Haw and Rough Haw – one conically pointed, the other an irregular breast. Further east, a long, high escarpment, given focus by the rocky bulge of Embsay Crag, suggests the presence of distant uplands without offering to reveal them. Yet, of course, I know, and certainly feel, that out in the hundreds of square miles¹ beginning at that quadrant is the limestone and milestone grit landscape that composes a fundamental of my identity. I would identity this knowledge and this feeling as 'home' if it were not for the fact that it is deeper and more complex than that.

For I was not born in this landscape; I do not come from it, in that sense. My native land, my birthplace, is 20 miles south-east from Skipton down the Aire Valley in Bradford, a city recumbent on the beds of momentarily younger sedimentary rocks than those that compose the dales. But the difference in the rocks is only a matter of 20 million years and, more to the point, the source of the Aire – the river that carved Bradford's niche in the land – lies near Malham and therefore is rooted deep in, and emerges from, that same, more ancient, limestone that I am reminded of, and touched by, every time I finish that drive into Skipton. The A65 is a path and so is the Aire; like all paths, their meaning is a treasure for which it benefits us to delve.

My father worked for the telephone arm of what was then called the 'General Post Office' (or GPO). He surveyed the ground over which new cables would be strung and prepared maps that detailed the installation. His beat was the whole of North Yorkshire, a location that had caused our move from Bradford to Skipton when I was 14.

One Saturday, before we made that move, he took me with him in his GPO ‘golden yellow’ 15-hundredweight² Commer van up into the high dales whilst he worked some overtime. Latterly, he followed the precipitous, gated track west of Arncliffe along the southern flank of Darnbrook Fell that ultimately devolves at Settle. I now think this was deliberately to show off a wonderful discovery.

At the high spot of the track, there is space to pull off the road and stop on the wide downslope of grass. You wouldn't want to go too far. The vista there is quite astonishing, particularly if you take just a few strides towards where the slope drops abruptly away.

What opens up is the deep cleft cut west-east by Cowside Beck as it drops to Littondale and the river Skirfare. Opposite are the raw, horizontal edges of rock composing Yew Cogar Scar and the vertical slices of falling streams that have cut the fell back and eroded out thrusting buttresses.

As well as 'Yew Cogar Scar', the names of the features there are an intoxicating brew of the brusque and domestic, Scandinavian-rooted, guttural and abrupt, exemplars of what you might call deep-Yorkshire. There is 'Flask' and 'Dew Bottoms' and 'Flock Rake'; there is simply 'Height', 'Out Pasture', and 'Back Pasture'. There is more than one occurrence of 'Clowder', the collective noun for cats, which, examining the nature of the territory, I daresay has more to do with claws than with fur.

My father didn't comment on the scene – that would certainly not have been his style – he just offered it to me silently, as a gift. With the passage of time, I have come to believe he deliberately took the path up to that place to demonstrate something of himself to me in a way he could never do with words. Place, path, and identity juxtapose and intersect. Since then, when the opportunity has arisen over the years, I have taken Ian, Jon, Lu, and Sam up there too. This is not because I fail for words but because I glory in that particular landscape's ability to offer a profound summary of a specific and concrete identity, which yet remains best understood through the visual and visceral.

One other thing I wouldn't want to miss about that spot is the human element. The names I quoted earlier are, of course, the evidence of peoples marking and defining the features that impinged on their attention. It was not for me nor my father nor his this valley the first to scan. Human possession – and possessiveness – are explicitly marked here by the dry-stone walls. So what? you might ask Even handkerchief-sized fields are walled around here. Well, the walls at Cowside Beck rise vertically up the slopes, paralleling the falling streams that shape the buttresses. They defy gravity. Their stacks express a species of obsession about boundaries and containment.

Who built those things? questioned a friend in awe some years ago.

Some mad bastard. I suggested, out of the depths of my own ignorance and wonder.

It was only later that I discovered that one 'mad bastard' was my younger brother. He had offered to help Little Colin fix walls on his farm, and some of them were these. The walls therefore, equally despite or because of their unlikely situation, also spoke of a particularly muscular humanity.

Coming down west from Cowside Beck one gloriously sunny Friday evening in November, Sam and I turned aside towards Malham and parked at the roadside just north of the village. On foot, the path we now took felt like the route of a pilgrimage. After a quarter of a mile crossing grass, we entered the famous basilica and strode the track trod by thousands through the nave to approach the apse formed by Malham Cove.

The Cove is a rounded, overhanging end-wall of crumbling, creamy limestone springing 100 feet high from the floor below. Four massive bands of successive deposition, infiltrated by smaller accumulations, divide the face like the layers of an anaemic cake. This description is not to denigrate: that colour matches that of the marble constructing the man-made cathedrals of Europe; that limestone is the precursor material out of which the deep parts of the Earth forged that marble. Malham Cove, whose mason was nature, evokes as much feeling, history and sense of belonging as does York Minster, whose mason was man. If I were inclined to give it a location, that fundamental of my identity invoked by those last few miles into Skipton is located here, in the enclosure of the Cove.

That November Friday, I was diverted from my thoughts by the explosive arrival of a young man. He ran wildly past me, legs barely keeping up, with arms cartwheeling. He was wearing nothing but shorts and a pair of ancient trainers. Momentarily, another older man ran past, though more steadily, probably because he was carrying a heavy kitbag in his arms. They both had the air of men released from a grinding week's work, if not a sentence in prison.

The first did not slow down but ran to, threw himself at, and started to climb the Cove bare-handed. It was an animalistic act of release and assault and could not last long. He fell from fifteen feet up and his body bounced on the stoney floor. Yet, with one movement he was up and attacked the rock again with what seemed undiminished fury. His friend had reached there by now and was emptying ropes and climbing hardware from the kitbag. Drifting through the air sounded like pleas for moderation. Here really was a tiger on the fells, assuredly with claws out.

There are as many ways to the top of a cliff or crag as there are personalities that pursue it. Our tiger had his and I had mine. There is a gently winding path at the west end of Malham Cove and ten minutes later it brought us out on the clint and gryke cut limestone pavement that walks back from the edge of the cliff. It was a wonderful perch upon which to take in the last oblique rays of sun, the web of shapes and shadows cast on the green fields below and the hills beyond by the walls and the ripples of land.

I do not need to utter prayers, contemplate statuary, or be inspired by stained-glass art to experience devotional moments, not when I have a path that will bring me to such places. The walker’s treasure is this: there are many paths and many such places. Better even than that is that they are available to anyone who is willing to spend a certain amount of time, expend a certain amount of sweat, stretch a certain amount of muscle, and open an unjaundiced eye to look.

oooO0Oooo

The Taxonomy of Paths

A path is a prior interpretation of the best way to traverse a landscape, and to follow a route is to accept an interpretation, or to stalk your predecessors on it as scholars and traders and pilgrims do. Rebecca Solnit³

An enlightening moment, such as that of mine at Malham, is an end to hope for, but what about a beginning? We have to start somewhere. It may well be that ultimately all paths in the world begin at your front door but upon what, and where, do you take that first step? This is to ask the blunt, and seemingly simple, question: what is a path? I have found that there isn’t one answer but categories of answer – in short, a taxonomy. Unanticipated too, I discovered that looking for the answers became in itself a form of journey through my own experiences and memory.

All journeys need a point of departure. I chose to start with reference to an obvious authority. If you open one of its maps, the Ordnance Survey (OS) offers what, on the surface at least, appear to be quite satisfactory definitions of a path. Yet, it didn’t take me much digging to realise that its definitions were addressing quite different questions than the ones that were shaping in my mind. This wasn’t a loss. The OS’s critical contribution was to reveal the inherent ambiguity that lay at the root of my task, as we will see.

At the right margin of each of its 1:50,000 scale maps (the ‘Landranger’ series), the OS prints what is known technically as a ‘legend’ (though now labelled 'Customer Information'). A legend illustrates and explains the symbols that are used on a map to indicate features in the landscape. Comfortingly enough, a section here headed 'Roads and Paths' contains the OS’s preferred indicator for a path. It is a dashed, black line. Right, so that's it, the single solution: I just need to look for a dashed, black line across the area I wish to traverse.

No, hang on, there is more. Another section headed 'Public Rights of Way' caught my eye. Here there were more categories and symbols to conjure with:

Footpath – Short-dashed red line

Bridleway – Dashed red line

Road used as a public path – Combined short and long-dashed red line

Byway open to all traffic – Short-dashed and crossed red line

Was that then everything? Were all the possible categories now covered? No, not yet. There's the 'Other Public Access' section too:

Other route with public access – Round-dotted red line

National trail – Diamond-dotted red line

Indeed, looking back to 'Roads and Paths', I found I might also need to take an interest in ‘Other road, drive or track’. These are indicated by solid, parallel black lines. Oh, wait, not always: they’re also shown as dashed, parallel black lines to presumably indicate some variation on meaning that the OS fails to describe (though by comparison with other symbols it seems to mean 'unfenced').

Are you with me so far? Perhaps not. I admit that I wasn’t with me at this point. I was more lost than before I started. In trying to inhabit their maps with this bestiary of paths, and the fine distinctions between them, the OS had not clarified the walker's way but brought it into obscurity.

As an exhibit, let me take you through the territory approaching a small mountain called Pike O'Blisco, which lies a few miles west of Ambleside in Cumbria, just off of the Wrynose Pass route to the valley of Eskdale and the distant coast.

When walking there recently, I left the car at the landmark Three Shire Stone⁴ that stands just shy of the spot height marking the top of Wrynose Pass. Low cloud threatened visibility on the fells above but the forecast suggested its height would correspond with the summit of Pike O'Blisco (just over 700 metres). Hence, there was a 50:50 chance I'd be in the clear at the peak, no bad thing as I was looking forward to the views over to the nearby and renowned peak of Bowfell and its accompanying massif, which was my planned destination for later in the week.

Given the potential for mist, I was looking for a clear path to help avoid navigational mistakes. And that was exactly what I found running right from the Three Shire Stone: a wide and firm-surfaced cut through the grass. The OS symbol identified it as a 'footpath'. Reading the map, and following the dashed red line, I expected this footpath to take me to Red Tarn, which fills the base of the valley some 180 metres below and to the south-west of the summit of Pike O’Blisco. My footpath passed by Red Tarn but another one – marked as an equal on the map – branched right as you reached the tarn to directly ascend the fell. This branch was my target. Yet, when I got there, I found that it did not exist.

At the same point, in addition and parallel to my original footpath going past the tarn, the OS map asserts the presence of an extra route. This one is marked as a 'path'. I wandered by the tarn, still looking for my ascent route, and, whether it was a footpath or a path (it looked no different from what had gone before), what I was on remained an only child. There was only one passage people had trodden into this ground.

Stubbornly, I decided to head back in the direction of Three Shire Stone and systematically try and find the direct line to Pike O'Blisco shown on the map that I had sought earlier.

The mist was mixing up visibility a little now so I took particular care to scan repeatedly across the folds of the hillside. Perhaps 250 metres east of Red Tarn, almost hidden against the greens and greys of the fell, I finally made out a faint cross shape. It was a stile. If there was a stile, there was an obstacle being crossed; if an effort had been made to cross an obstacle, there must be a path. In fact, when I reached it, it was not so much a path (or footpath) as an indistinct furrow in the vegetation that did not even penetrate the top layer and, in any case, vanished perhaps 100 metres further on. The map indicated nothing here, which, given the sparsity of the mark the path made, was almost true; actually, the map did offer a district boundary following this line, but a district boundary isn’t the same as a walker’s route.

So what did I do? Knowing the direction to the summit, I pressed on over pristine slopes (according to the map) or threading through crags (according to what emerged through the mist) until I intercepted another path that was as clear and wide as the one I’d started on at Three Shire Stone. Following this new path ultimately guided me to the beehive-shaped cairn atop the final rocky platform. Referring again to the map, I saw that the OS calls the latter path a 'path' too, not a 'footpath'. So far as I could see on the ground, there was no difference in appearance or structure that required this distinction. In effect, the map had proved a tool of confusion.

Later, I was interested to contrast those ambiguities with the logical and sequential scheme the OS employs for roads. Literally from top to bottom this reads:

Motorway

Primary Route

Main road

Secondary road

Narrow road

Road generally more than 4m wide

Road generally less than 4m wide

Other road, drive or track (as noted before)

This represents a meaningful hierarchy and one that settles comfortably into a taxonomy we all recognize. All our experiences of driving are covered from smooth town-to-town transit at 70mph to rough crawling up a pitted track to a farm.

Examining the more or less ambiguous treatments further identifies the problem with the OS efforts with paths. The different types of path the OS insist on do not reflect a graduation of experiences on the ground; they reflect legalistic categorizations that seem better suited to the hair-splitting of the courtroom. My boots and I just wanted to know where to tread and what manner of ground we would find there.

Yet, by wrestling with the flawed OS conceptions, I had moved my understanding forward. What was clear to me now was the nature of my quest: I wanted to be able to judge the viability and character of a route. It was just that simple, physical thing that I sought, no more. Beyond that goal I did not seek to be guided. I recognised that I would be content for the outcome – for any devotional and inspirational gold at the end of the path – to be solely up to me and what I made of the landscape I found.

It was time to look further afield. Although the OS is mapper to the nation, it is not the only player in the game of fell-walking guidance. Far from it. There have been books pitched at the level of what I would call technical guidance since at least the late nineteenth century. There is, in short, a tradition of grappling with the representation of paths for use on the fells. How had others gone about it?

For the most part, others have gone about it by exercising a sleight of hand. Instead of trying to capture the concrete nature of the path as it exists on the ground they have chosen instead to offer the abstract reality of the route. 'Route' isn't actually anything, it is an imaginary line that hovers slightly above the messiness of grass, mud, scree, rock, and the rest that might lie between one point and another. Drawing a route means never having to engage with the toe-stubbing facts that a path forces on a walker.

The first to take this approach (or 'originally compiled' as Ward Lock the publisher had it), was the resoundingly named M J B Baddeley, BA, in 1880. His The English Lake District continued to be updated and published until the 1960s (I have a sixteenth edition from the 1920s⁵) and it had a strong influence on no less than Alfred Wainwright, the later chronicler of the Lake District.

The frontispiece of Baddeley's guide promised that it came 'with 15 coloured contour maps'. As the famous map makers, John Bartholomew and Son of Edinburgh – at times regarded as equal to the OS – were responsible, the quality of those maps was very high. The guide describes numerous walks from central locations. The text provides a detailed narrative of directions and the maps illustrate the routes. Not a bad effort: the text lets us know at least the basic character of the land.

With the opening book of his A Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells⁶ in 1955, Wainwright was one of the few to wrestle with integrating path and route. He combines them by stitching together paths to form his routes and only where no paths exist does he rely on indicating routes alone. For each fell listed in the Guide, Wainwright draws both a detailed, birds-eye view (comparable in detail to that offered by the OS) and – uniquely – a topographical rendering of the shape of the high land as though seen from a point in space horizontal to it. The combination provides one with an unsurpassed sense of confidence that one knows the weft and warp of the layout of the place. And there is a place for a hierarchy of paths too, albeit a simple one. Wainwright draws three versions, which he calls 'Good footpath', 'Intermittent footpath', and 'Route recommended (but no path)'. These basic fellows prove to be good companions.

You might think that the veracity of photography would have a centre-stage role, but this is the case in most guide books only to the extent that the photographs provide aesthetically pleasing portraits of the individual mountains described. This is fine as eye-candy, and to get your fell-walking juices flowing, but only provides the look and not the feel. The great exception to this approach is that taken by W A Poucher in his 1965 The Scottish Peaks⁷. Poucher was a renowned landscape photographer (Bill Birkett, no slouch in that department himself, cites him as an 'inspiration' in his Complete Lakeland Fells⁸). Poucher used his skills to richly illustrate his guide. In essence, Poucher supplies photographs of each walk he describes with the course of the walk itself marked in a bold and unequivocal white line on the print. This serves well to set the direction of the eye when surveying the fell before you, but is inevitably crude in detail. The walker in those 'master-of-all-I-survey' moments is well informed, but during those head-down, inspecting boot-tips minutes, little benefit is derived.

Of course, there are authoritative organisations other than the OS guiding us across our favoured lands. The Scottish Mountaineering Club (SMC) has a privileged grip on the documentation of Scotland's 3000 foot plus mountains through its eponymous