Bagging & scrambling
Celebrating the glorious madness of those who say ‘that was fun – now let’s do all of them!’
Walking for the upwardly mobile.
COLLECTORS, COMPLETISTS, BINGERS, baggers, obsessives, geeks, masochists, adventurers: call them (us) what you will, the tick-lister is the type of person who makes the walking world go round.
It takes a certain type of character, with a precise balance of desire and bloody-mindedness, to be inspired to collect the ‘box set’ of a particular type of objective. In most cases it’s about peaks, or collections of peaks. Here are a few of the classic bagging ambitions…
The Wainwrights: the 214 Lake District fells covered by Alfred Wainwright in his Pictorial Guides. The Munros: the 282 Scottish mountains over 3000ft The Nuttalls: the 446 mountains over 2000ft in England and Wales
The Marilyns: the 2011 mountains in the UK with a prominence of 150 metres (i.e. they are 150 metres higher than any land around them)
County Tops: the highest points in each county; there are between 54 and 95 depending on how you count them.
But it doesn’t have to be peaks. There are pass-baggers, tarn-baggers, trig-baggers, dewpond-baggers; walkers who track down Harry Potter film locations, blue plaques, famous graves, ancient sites, Armada beacons, war memorials. It’s a growth industry, purely because we keep finding more things to make lists out of.
There are of course many forms of bagging in the wider world, from stamp collecting and trainspotting to the Dull Men’s Club (an ever-growing online database of the direction taken by baggage carousels in the airports of the world – clockwise or anticlockwise). But walking lends itself so perfectly to obsessiveness and completism, because there’s just so much land out there to obsess over and complete.
Our very own columnist and marcher Stuart Maconie is a Wainwright completer, and he sums up the appeal beautifully: “It was a way to experience the whole of the Lake District, not just the famous bits. It baffles me that thousands of people only ever want to climb Helvellyn, while just a proportional handful will ever climb Bowscale Fell or Sheffield Pike.
“Having done them all, I now get to choose where I go, and it’s the quiet, curious little fells that I like to go back
to. That’s what doing the Wainwrights gives you: the full story.”
And that’s why we liken it to the box set or binge-stream. Yes, if you want to watch the Red Wedding from Game of Thrones, skip to Diana in The Crown or hear Walt say “I am the one who knocks” in Breaking Bad you can do that, sure.
But isn’t it so much better to work your way through, get the full story, fall in love with the characters, boo the baddies (among the Wainwrights that usually means Kirk Fell or Mungrisdale Common), feel the drama; and get immersed to the point that you automatically click ‘next episode’ when the credits roll?
We say it is. Collectors, completists, bingers, baggers, obsessives, geeks, masochists, adventurers: be heartened. You are among friends here.