| beg to differ

The times where I haven’t quite agreed with AW…

‘Lakeland’

I’m usually with AW on the thorny topic of names. Blencathra is undoubtedly a more fittingly beautiful name than Saddleback. But I always find ‘Lakeland’ a bit sugary and coy, more suited to a souvenir tea-towel than these wonderful books.

A Pictorial Guide to the Fells of the English Lake District would have been better, but maybe it wouldn’t have fitted the cover so well. Which brings me to…

Pavey Ark

It’s a cliff, not a separate fell. Neither is Birks, really. And don’t even start about Mungrisdale Common. Ever wondered why each of the seven volumes is the same beautifully compact size? Because sneaky but aesthetically sensitive Wainwright put design rather than topography first when picking those canonical 214.

Accidents

According to Wainwright, in a sadly typical bit of haughty pronouncement, “all fellwalking accidents are the result of carelessness”, which makes me wish a strong gust of wind had blown him off a minor escarpment from time to time or a goat headbutted him in the Borrowdales. See also…

Weather

“There’s no such thing as bad weather, only unsuitable clothing,” said the man who walked in a tweed suit initially and seemed to have only one anorak. Clearly he never visited Cape Wrath in November.

Corporal punishment… and worse

You don’t have to be Gandhi (or even Owen Jones) to find Wainwright’s political views (as outlined in his rather odd, angry autobiography Memoirs of a Fellwanderer) somewhat un-nuanced to say the least. In it he relishes ‘birching criminals until they beg for mercy’ and elsewhere blithely advocates beheading, sterilisation and castration as tools for general social improvement.