Hill Bagging - a blessing or a curse?

Sometimes I feel there should be some sort of support group for people with a serious hill bagging addiction, somewhere you can turn up and stand in a room of fellow sufferers and proudly say "My name is Col and I'm a hill bagger" (feel free to use another name if you're not called Col). A group where people really understand your irrational drive to travel hundreds of miles, endure terrible weather, to walk/climb for hours just to put a tick in a book or fill in another box on a spreadsheet.

The view from Low Fell - cheers Alfred Wainwright

For those not in the know, hill bagging is a bit like outdoor stamp collecting. Instead of having lots of albums full of gummed bits of paper we have ticklists and pictures of us looking dishevelled stood next to cairns or trig points. We don't trawl through ebay looking for a rare penny black or a mint condition Malaysian commemorative first day cover, no we are a lot cooler than that, we surf the web trying to find out if there's a linking route between two obscure peaks so we can get two ticks from one walk. While stamp collectors might have guides to prices and values we have Munro tables and Wainwright guides. I'm probably painting a really bad picture of the hillbagger here, but its not all geekishness and obsession, there are adventures to be had and experiences that you would never have thought of without following a ticklist; one of my favourite ever views from a summit was the one from Low Fell in the Lake District looking back over Crummock Water and Buttermere to Fleetwith Pike and Haystacks, somewhere I would have never thought of going if it wasn't one of Alfred Wainwright's Western Fells.

In its simplest form hill bagging is the act of getting to all the summits in a certain list - and there are lots of lists. The oldest and probably the most famous are the Munros - first conceived by Sir Hugh Munro back in 1891. These are the Scottish mountains over 3000 feet in height which can be viewed as a separate mountain from any adjacent ones - there is no rigid criteria for height difference unlike some other lists and in total there are currently 282 with a further 227 Munro Tops (mountains over 3000 feet but no real distinction between its summit and the neighbouring ones). It took only 10 years for the first person to claim that they had completed this feet, Reverend A E Robertson in 1901 although it is possible he missed the summit of Ben Wyvis.

One of the really nice thing about hillbagging is that a lot of it is taken on trust, so its probably no coincidence that the first recorded completer of the Munros was a Reverend. When I finished the Wainwrights and got my completers certificate from the Wainwright Society no one asked to see proof that I had been to the top of all 214 summits, all I had to do was give the name and date of getting to the top of my first and last fells and that was it. At the end of the day its a personal achievement and you're only really cheating yourself by claiming you've done something you haven't and if you get into conversation with someone that really has done them all then you will usually get found out pretty quickly. Anyway, back to the lists.

Armboth Fell "cairn" - not really worth the effort

Hill lists normally fall into one of two categories; you have those that are measurable, like the Munros (if its over 3000 feet, in Scotland and a separate summit then it qualifies), if its between 2500 and 2999 feet with a prominence (height difference) of 500 feet or more and in Scotland then its a Corbett and so on. On the other hand you have lists that are more subjective where they are in a list purely because of someone's opinion. A good example of this type are the Wainwrights. If hill baggers are a meticulous and obsessive breed then Alfred Wainwright was the ultimate example. On the 9th November 1952 Alfred Wainwright sat down to start writing his seven volume Pictorial Guides to the Lakeland Fells, he estimated it would take him the next 13 years. Working at the rate of one page per day he produced page after page of beautifully hand drawn and hand written work filled with information, not just of routes but history, geology, humour, maps and views. They are not just guides, they are works of art. There were no hard and fast rules as to which summits he chose to include and there is much debate about why he chose to include something so insignificant as Mungrisdale Common (a small grassy lump in the middle of an upland moor) but left out Helvellyn Lower Man (a large peak nearly 3000 feet high) - who knows? it was his list so his choice I guess.

Five and a half years to get from one hand to the other

Technically the Wainwrights were the second list I finished, but you cant really count the English Furths as there are only 6 of them, It took me just under 5 and a half years of zooming up and down the M6, camping, sleeping in my car, working out routes, filling in spreadsheets and colouring in maps. It cost me a lot of money and took up a lot of time but I loved virtually every minute of it - well I did with hindsight, at the time some of them were pure hell and I questioned my sanity on several occasions (as did a lot of other people).

I cant speak for all addicts and I don't know if this happens to all hill baggers but I feel like I went through a bit of a metamorphosis . When I first started it was a case of "summit at all costs", getting there come hell or high water (quite often the water wasn't high, more like falling torrentially from the sky), doing the mountain by the quickest possible route and then trying to get as many more in that day as I could. Every spare day or weekend was commandeered as a Wainwright day, the car would be filled with gear and I would leave home in the early hours and I wouldn't return until late at night with more ticks to go on my spreadsheet. The spreadsheet was a thing of hill bagging beauty! It told me not just how many I had done but the perentage of each book, which months I had done the most peaks in (generally April and September, don't ask my why that was, or why I wanted to know it), the average height of the completed summits, all manner of geekiness in excel format. The day all that changed wasn't actually on a Wainwright fell, it was on Ingleborough in North Yorkshire. The first 18 months of just concentrating on the Wainwrights made me pretty bored of the M6 and I started taking the odd weekend off to go walking in other places - it was weird, I almost felt like I was being unfaithful to the Lake District. Anyway, one of those stolen, illicit days I decided to do Ingleborough and it was a really crappy day; high winds, low cloud, cold, miserable. I set off from Clapham and by the time I was halfway up I was wet through and getting battered by the wind. I plodded on until I got to the crest of Little Ingleborough which isn't too far from the top. I could have made the summit quite easily from there but it suddenly struck me ... why? Yes, I would get a tick (Ingleborough is on the Trail 100, Hewitts and Nuttalls lists) but I wouldn't get the view Ingleborough is famous for, I couldn't say that I had experienced Ingleborough other than having got to the top, all I would have seen would have been grey clouds, the odd bit of limestone and the trig point and wind shelter at the top. The other thing is that hill bagging as just a tick list exercise is all about the new, which new ticks have I got, where can I go that I haven't been? If I had completed Ingleborough that day then it wouldn't be a priority any more, it would have its tick and the next time I was in the area then I would be looking for somewhere else to plant my metaphorical flag. So, I gave up, turned around and headed back. That was the point that my mindset changed - enough of racing to the top, tick, on to the next one, tick. No more always looking for something new to do. Don't get me wrong, I'm still a hillbagger but now the priority is not "conquering the hill" (a phrase a detest as how can you conquer something as big as a mountain - you can get to the top but the mountain will always be greater than you) its appreciating it, taking the best way up, really getting to know it. Sure, it may take a little longer but in my book its worth the time and effort.

The highest hill to bag of the lot

I started this blog saying that hillbagging was like stamp collecting, but really that's what it is at its worst. At its best its a framework for adventure - the chance to go places you would never really have thought of, to research routes and mountains during times that you can't physically be on them, to acquire an impressive collection of maps and be able to sit on the bench on top of Latrigg in the Lakes and look at all the high mountains, fells and summits arrayed in front of you and say "I've done all of those"

Just as an appendix to the above, here is a list of the lists - should you be interested:

Munros - hills in Scotland above 3000 feet and separate from the next summit (282)
Munro Tops - summits in Scotland above 3000 feet but negligible difference between it and the next (227)
Corbetts - summits in Scotland between 2500 and 2999 feet with 500 feet of prominence (221)
Grahams - summits in Scotland between 2000 and 2499 with 150 metres of prominence (221)
Donalds - hills in lowland Scotland above 2000 feet sometimes with a prominence of 98 feet (but not always!) (140)

Mountains in England, Wales and Ireland that would qualify as Munros but for the fact they are not in Scotland are called Furths (6 in England, 15 in Wales and 13 in Ireland)

Trail 100s - the best 100 hills and mountains in Britain as voted for by readers of Trail magazine
Nuttalls - summits in England and Wales over 2000 feet with a prominence of 49 feet (254 in England and 190 in Wales)
Hewitts - Hills in England, Wales and Ireland above Two Thousand feet with a prominence of 98 feet (528 Hewitts in total: 179 in England, 138 in Wales and 211 in Ireland)
Birketts - summits in the Lake District above 1000 feet (541)
Wainwrights - the fells in Alfred Wainwrights Pictorial Guides (214)
County Tops - the highest points of either the modern or the historical counties of Britain
Humps - any hill with a prominence of 100 metres (nearly 3000 of these)
Marilyns - any hill with a prominence of 150 metres (1556 in Britain)
Fellrangers - the hills written about by Mark Richards in his guides to the Lake District

If you still require more lists then there are Deweys, Hardys and Tumps.

You can even create your own lists of whatever you want. I am currently doing the Gillhams (hills written about by John Gillham in his guides to the mountains of Snowdonia) and the English Top 50, which is, as you might guess, the highest 50 mountains in England. Nearly finished these apart from The Cheviot and Mickle Fell (because its in a military live firing range - getting blown up would really make hill bagging a curse).