Trig Points: On the Track of the Permanent Fell-Walk

By Mick Harney

Completing the Points trilogy, Trig Points sees Mick Harney's further exploration of the fells, revealing more of their physical character and the nature of his personal interactions with them.

It is easy to take place names as given and timeless. Here, they become tools for opening up the deep history and detailed landscape of fells and their locations. Trig Points shows how each derivation creates a unique Namescape.

Mick pursues and completes his second round of Alfred Wainwright's list of the fells. In doing so, he devises Signature Walks where the purpose of a day's expedition is to link together several fells, creating a harder challenge that draws out new relationships between the tops across a wider area. Described in detail, the routes are offered for anyone to share.

Closing the history of Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Keswick, this account tells of his growth as a fell-walker and mountaineer, uncovering his pioneering walks on Helvellyn and Scafell. It is overlain with his fraught descent into drug addiction, struggling with the binaries of success and perceived failure.

We may think we know the height of a mountain and the distance to the summit, but Trig Points examines the intriguing surprises about how we calculate those values. Likewise, it looks afresh at the interactions we have on the fells…and not just with people.

In the end, the book shows how all fuse into a flow; into the rolling continuity of the permanent fell-walk.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mick Harney
• Release date: Nov 4, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005646424

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

Preface

As we began our return, Stewy said, Well, what challenges next?. I replied, Perhaps my second round. We were negotiating the descent from the summit of Great End. It was Saturday, 16 September 2006 and Stewy, Valerie, Sam, and Nige had joined me in completion of my round of the Wainwrights. Or, as I could now say, my first round.

There was actually no ‘perhaps’ in the transition; for me, no ambiguity intervened. The continuity was seamless. I began my second round of the Wainwrights on Birks at the southern end of Ullswater the following Tuesday.

That was a wonderful day of squalls, light and shade, rainbows after showers, clean air pierced with radiating sun, visions of the rough-hewn east crags of Helvellyn. My happiness, contentment, and sense of freedom were palpable. Nothing to prove and everything to enjoy. As we emerged onto the grassy hollow between Birks and St Sunday Crag, Sam said, prophetically, I want to finish my Wainwrights on Easter Sunday, eating an Easter Egg, on the top of St Sunday Crag. And that’s exactly how it was on Easter Sunday, 24 April 2011. The same people who had been with us on Great End were there, along with one of Sam’s closest friends, Sandra, and her husband-to-be, Tim¹.

But now is not the time to rush along the route. This is a good point to invite you to step aside from the path with me for a moment. Think of it as sitting on a boulder to gather a few thoughts.

I am mindful that the narrative to come needs setting in a wider context if I am to represent myself and the experience fully. Without going so far as him, I am reminded of Andrew Greig’s comparison of clichéd climbing accounts to the monotonous dehydrated food ubiquitous at altitude: ‘as with those cursed freeze-drieds, the contents are there but the whole juice and inner substance of the experience is missing.’²

I have described how I stepped out of my first round and strode into my second as though crossing that gap were as simple as footing from one boulder to the next in a field of mountain scree. Of course, the latter isn’t simple and landing on the next boulder one often comes a cropper. Yet it is true that there was no ‘perhaps’ at the time. It is only with time and retrospect that a truer – and more interesting – perspective has emerged. Progressing through my second round gradually altered my understanding of its beginning. It would be a strange business if it had not: over a decade was to pass in its accomplishment so I could hardly remain unchanged by so many mountains and so much life.

From early on in my fell-walking (or as accurately ‘fell-waking’) career, the motivation to go to the next fell was unwavering. Although in Eric Shipton's case it was his feeling for the Himalayas and Karakoram, he captures a key truth for me:

It was enthralling to disentangle the geography of the region, to arrange the peaks and valleys and glaciers in their true perspective, and gradually to learn to know them with an intimacy and understanding that, for me, is the basic reason for mountaineering.³

My own development and practice combined fascination for both the individual fell and for its setting among others. There is one revelation being at the summit of a mountain and another appreciating the same mountain from afar among its companions. That pleasure grows in potency when you add the memory of being at those companion summits too.

Eventually, you knit together an intimate fabric out of the many days experiencing your chosen area and the mesh of those memories of summits and their setting approaches a whole. Clearly, that accomplishment is a lengthy piece of work. That is part of why it is so valuable. My first Wainwright round took me 23 years. I am sure as many people have done it quicker as have taken as long or longer. That illustrates a great truth: rounds, like people, are individual and subject to the vagaries of time and opportunity. The journey is a personal one.

The additional fascination and frustration of that protracted journey is its inevitable compromises. Not every one of the 214 fells in Wainwright can be bathed in sunshine or glowing in snow when you arrive. Not every arrival at a starting point can even result in getting on the fell. Think of the days when rain, wind, fog, or some unholy combination of those and other toxic meteorologys force an abandonment, sometimes within a few hundred feet of the top. The round cannot be declared complete until you return, try again, and this time succeed. And in all cases only the summit will do as the full stop at the end of the sentence. What is missing even then if, say, the mist is down? It is the appreciation of the distant or even not so distant fells. The fitting together. To put that another way, in some regard all rounds are incomplete.

Was that in my mind as I casually committed to a second round, talking to Stewy as we descended Great End in 2006? No, it wasn’t. I didn’t know enough. Like electricity flowing along a cable, I had no thought of deviating from the path I was on to the next outlet. In its simplicity, one foot would inevitably follow the other. The potency of that flow alone was quite enough to drive me forward just then – and in the days and weeks that followed.

When did I become conscious of a new factor, a new colour, in my palette of perceptions? I have spent some time poring over my notebooks, lists, and other records and found no specific moment, no revelation. I conclude there was none. This was a gradual alteration, a subtle shift; something grew that did not visit consciousness but changed it.

Yet, I do have a faint, warm memory of a happy and satisfactory recognition. I do not know which fell I was on. That does not matter. I sense it was at one of those breaks of stride when, although in good form and ascending well, I paused to take a breath to appreciate my immersion and the beauty of the surroundings. It was one of those. ‘How do you feel?’ they ask the medal winner coming off the rostrum. How did I feel? Among good company, among mountain friends so long known that a turn of phrase expresses years. There was mutual respect, earned as well as expected. I looked out to a scene that, unconsciously, I had worked so hard on and over that it had become inseparable with what was within. In the same finding as in a true, human relationship, here was a more relaxed intimacy; more of a belonging. It was a comfort not a rush. I had no need to record it – I moved on with it within.

Whenever that occurred, I believe I can detect how in stages my fell-walking matured afterwards. What follows is its manifestation.

And so now is the time to stand up again, get back on the path, and press on.

On Units of Measurement

Throughout the Points trilogy I have employed a mixture of metric and imperial units. This is not anti-metric nor sloppy inconsistency. To match the Ordnance Survey maps, I use metric. To avoid historical anachronism, I use imperial. Today, in messy, colourful reality, we switch between metric and imperial as needed (litres of petrol, pints of beer). Beyond is the personal, but then Points is personal. My intuitions of fell-walking scope were formed long ago: I translate metres of ascent into feet and kilometres of distance into miles. Sometimes that is just in my mind but – as you will see – sometimes my mind is on the page too.

Introduction – Signature Walks

The first person to make a non-stop round of the nearly three-hundred strong 3000 foot mountains of Scotland⁴, the Munros, was Hamish M Brown in 1974, a feat he recorded in his book Hamish’s Mountain Walk. He had previously completed (or compleated, as the parlance has it) in less continuous fashion in 1965, 1969, and 1970. He went on to finish further rounds in 1975, 1979, and 1984, a remarkable record.

Of the non-stop achievement of 1974 he observed that, ‘Long walks like this...were the outcome of decades of knocking about in the highlands’⁵. A shrewd point that unfortunately he goes on to expand in typically condescending style:

Certainly dream dreams, that is the birthright of youth, but you cannot grow vegetables without digging the soil. My preparation was almost two thousand Munros long.

By diluting his observation with a variation on the cliché, ‘learn to walk before you can run’, Brown undermines the potency of the point he has made. My take on it is: the more you walk, the more you discover more walking. At first sight, my formulation appears tautologous, so no stronger than Brown's. I'll elaborate.

When I lived in London for ten years, I did much travelling on foot. It was partly a financial necessity. As time passed, I began to marvel at a phenomenon that was not apparent at first. Occasionally, circumstances caused me to stumble out of one familiar area and into another I had walked just as often. The phenomenon was that those areas were separated by perhaps only one street, square, park, or building but my mental map had them some larger, but vague, distance apart. My internal map of London had expanded and two smaller spaces now constituted a larger one. I knew London better and, in a developing way, more encompassed its whole. The practical benefit is obvious but it was a creative development too: I could choose from several lines to incorporate new routes exploiting the various pleasures of the cityscape.

I hope by now you perceive the parallel with landscape, with walking and the fells. The range of colours you have available on your mountain palette is enriched by ‘decades of knocking about'. I am thinking of the Cumbrian fells but could as easily refer to the Scottish highlands, as I spent seventeen years doing just that same knocking about (with more intermittent efforts since). But my particular focus since completing my first round of the Wainwrights in 2006 has been Cumbria and that is where I anchor this topic and this book.

What I want to introduce here is the concept of Signature Walks because my accounts of them figure large in this book. In summary, the signature walks are the blossom blooming from decades on the Lake District mountains.

There are classic walks savoured by the community because they are either longer than the norm, or particularly aesthetically rewarding, or both. For the Lake District, Wainwright suggests potential gatherings by detailing ridge routes between individual fells and by highlighting his favourites in his codicils to each book of the Pictorial Guide. Naturally, Sam and I had explored them too. For example, the last we did before her final fell on St Sunday Crag was the Fairfield Horseshoe: 11 miles to and from Ambleside, along a sweeping, U-shaped ridge covering eight fells with 3475 feet of ascent.

It was after Sam completed her round in 2011 that I detected the new urge: expand our reach into the fells to make our own walks that combined greater length and inherent reward. Calling them 'classic' would be presumptuous as they had not being vouchsafed by the community or by time. To distinguish them in our discussions, I came up with the expression Signature Walks.

The concept came, of course, from well-known chefs being identified with signature dishes: all at once they were a trademark, a claim to a culinary territory, and an embodiment of creativity. In our case, the application to walks came out of, at first, kite-flying discussions where, for the pleasure of it, we would call on our collective ‘knocking about’ to exchange strings of fell names that strode across, around, or between well-loved stretches of land.

It was a very entertaining and appealing exercise, so it was not long before the theory in an evening’s conversation ineluctably moved on to the question of feasibility. Yes, the walks proposed were much longer and more demanding than our common run of routes but that made them a new challenge. We wanted to go further. To that excitement was added the satisfaction of creating fresh relationships between the components of the landscape: making routes that genuinely widened our perspective, bringing us a deeper understanding of the high fells and their valley settings.

It marked a different style of confidence about and tenure over our endeavours. We did not presume others had not linked the same sets of fells together; it was that they were new and ambitious for us. We committed to reach beyond where we had reached before.

Doing my research, I was intrigued to discover we had semi-stumbled upon the same concept earlier on, though without formulating or naming the idea. The embryonic version concerned the Coniston Old Man ridge or, more specifically, undertaking a walk along its whole length from the Old Man to Great Carrs but also taking in the outliers of Dow Crag at the beginning and Grey Friar and Wetherlam at the end. It came up because Sam and I had not done any of the southern end of that ridge together though we had done it separately. We first punted for it in September 2012 but were driven back at Brim Fell when a hail storm brewed up backed by 50 mph winds.

So, intrinsic to our signature walks is that they would be hard for us to achieve. Were they actually do-able? Were they in our power? The answer to those questions would ultimately lie only in action but we did set, or rather assume, some limits based on our personal preferences.

There are many well-established long-distance walks, such as the Bob Graham round where the test is to complete 42 fells in 24 hours. Such tests are more like a form of torture: the extremity of the task is its purpose. It may act as a siren call to the ultras, and good luck to them, but we had something more measured in mind. Nevertheless the motivation was to make it new, or at least new to us, and not something we were aware of anyone else having done (we do not claim that our signature walks have never been done by someone else, just that we were guided by our own awareness – or lack of it).

Along much the same line of thought, although we treasure the famous extended rounds – Fairfield Horseshoe, Newlands Round, Mosedale Round, High Street, and so on – by virtue of their fame and presence in our existing repertoire we were clear that we had no right to appropriate them by redesignation as signature walks.

Our walks would last no longer than a day – and by that we meant our own idea of a day of less than 10 hours. Also, pushing our limits in Winter did not attract – though we've never spurned the occasional, short commando raid – so the de facto premise was to stick to three seasons. That had the beneficial effect of keeping the necessary kit light.

Relying on ourselves for transport, and being based in locations we already knew, led to a desire for circular rather than linear concepts or at least ones with a start and a finish in the same place (the need to zig and zag about remained an inescapable and often enriching reality). Finally, the walk had to have a purpose, even if it was no more than answering a nagging imperative that hung in our minds.

Those parameters make plain that these signature walks are very personal ones. Yet I guess they are also efforts that other fell walkers would approve of and perhaps identify with. I hope that you do as the various routes unfold throughout the book, punctuating and contextualising the other topics I focus on.

There is no limit to the number of signature walks you or I might have done or may devise, which is part of their fascination. The ones I describe in detail are chosen merely for the particular insights and pleasures I gained in the doing. Indeed, I have done others that I only note in passing and daresay there will be more to come as imagination and curiosity continue to thrive.

One Engaged in Retraversing the Wainwrights

Wainwright 428 – Part One

Engaged in re-traversing the Wainwrights, the overlap of Sam’s finishing years and my beginning ones served my goal well. Her last targets made companionship for my first crop as, of course, all of hers were fresh to my new round. With gaps between contracts, I took the opportunity to solo another 17 fells. Consequently, the four and a half years since my descent from Great End were happily productive, particularly as we were compromised on access living over 250 miles from the fells in Reading.

Including that ascent of St Sunday Crag, I’d already rediscovered 99 fells. After her success there, Sam’s attitude was plain, I won’t count towards a second round; one is enough for me. I was glad when she added that it would be fun to share the experience of completing the 115 summits I still needed. A month later, on reaching the low, curved windbreak atop Whinlatter, we ticked my total up to 100. Once again, with a century completed, the game kicked up another level. As I have described, one manifestation of that was how we set about conceiving and performing signature walks.

The first signature walk planned and anticipated as such was one we took in June 2013. This was to take in not just the whole Red Pike ridge, so prominent above and parallel to Buttermere, but also to delve back west through the boggy outlet of Mosedale to begin at the true, first height of the ridge, Great Borne, deep in the western hinterland almost at Ennerdale. Our traverse then crossed the neatly rounded and assertive Starling Dodd with its dual cairns – heaped metal fence scrap and traditional stones – before we took the rising land leading to the craggy and crumbled peaks of Red Pike, High Stile, and High Crag. It was fascinating to cross the perfectly clear dividing line on the path where the red chippings of Red Pike rock gave way to the greys of High Stile. The at-times narrow path between High Stile and High Crag is distinguished by the imposing gulfs where great craggy gouges tumble towards Buttermere. The unpleasant descent to Scarth Gap was on a hideous scar of shifting aggregate. Light was fading and we hurried to complete the final two mile passage along the length of Buttermere in 25 minutes to return to our start in the village before dark.

Knowing the general scope of it had induced a certain amount of anticipatory nerves. But that was exactly why we were setting out on these signature walks. Checking the detail afterwards showed it as all of 13 miles with 3332 feet of ascent. That gave a special glow. It is a significant route with much difficult terrain and therefore, we had found, raised the bar of what we could aspire to and achieve. A genuine test of top, fell-walking mettle. Tracing the shape of the route on the map struck me as resembling a spouting whale. Call me Buttermere Baleen.

That Buttermere round completed my bag of new fells for 2013, taking my second round total to 127 with 87 to go. That did not mean that I devoted my time only to those remaining. Nor did I allow signature walks to monopolise my life. In fact, during the whole of 2014 I ticked off a mere five extra fells. By contrast, our 2014 count of old friends stood at 25 as we continued to enjoy the other, repeat pleasures that we knew the mountains offered. That included the stringing together of familiars in a new chain to create the signature walk of Back O'Skiddaw (which demands a separate telling I'll come to later). In short, the priority never waivered from what it had always been for us on the fells: 'gradually to learn to know them with an intimacy and understanding'. Novelty in itself is not an unalloyed or only benefit.

2015 proved to be a rich year. By the end of it, we had collected a mix of renowned classics, original signatures, and other sole or small groups of summits. The ground we ranged across included sections from five of Wainwright's seven areas: