Up hill and down dale, the Victorians easily outpace us

How intrepid they were, our gallant Victorian forebears, swarming up Alpine peaks and Scottish crags in their thornproof tweed knickerbockers and stout flannel skirts, with not so much as a Fitbit or a protein bar between them. And they seem to have kept up a considerably brisker pace than their descendants.

In 1892 the Scottish mountaineer, William Naismith, devised a formula for calculating the time of an expedition, suggesting that “Men in fair condition should allow for easy expeditions... an hour for every three miles on the map, with an additional hour for every 2,000ft of ascent”. Over the years, various corrections to this rule of thumb have been proposed, but it is recognised in British law and used by the Scouting movement, the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award and the Armed Forces.

Now Ordnance Survey, the national mapping agency, has concluded that Naismith’s yomping rate is too punishing a pace for modern walkers and is revising its app to something more like an amble. Among other benefits, the new formula is intended to reduce the number of mountain rescue callouts to walkers who have underestimated their timings, freeing rescue teams to salvage walkers in more exotic difficulties.

Last week, a pair of women travelled some 130 miles from Redditch to Snowdon in pursuit of Easter eggs, supposed to have been left on the mountain after an egg hunt. They got stuck and had to be retrieved, eggless, by a team of rescuers. Their adventure offers an instructive contrast to the exploits of the redoubtable Victorian mountaineer, Lucy Walker, who took up climbing as an antidote to rheumatism and in 1871 became the first woman to climb the Matterhorn. She completed

her fourth ascent of the Eiger in the same year, fortified by sponge cake and champagne, entirely unencumbered by rescuers, or the means of summoning them.

Farewell, then, Eric Robson, whose departure last Friday from his 25-year stint as chair of Radio 4’s Gardeners’ Question Time was marked by much uproariousness over GQT’S occasional broadcasts from nudist gardening clubs (the ribald spirit of Benny Hill, vigorously weeded out elsewhere on the BBC, infests GQT like Robson’s cherished ground elder). Robson’s place is to be taken by Kathy Clugston, a BBC continuity announcer whose gardening expertise is largely confined to window boxes.

Rather than being a disadvantage, her horticultural inexperience might revive the wilting GQT format, where the facetious banter of the pot-bound gardening experts too often overshadows the tender shoots of proper gardening advice.

Pease pudding hot, pease pudding cold, pease pudding no longer in the pot, but passing into the realm of culinary history, to join tripe, lampreys and Brown Windsor soup in the melancholy catalogue of obsolete foodstuffs. The Sunday Telegraph reported the near extinction of pease pudding in all but its “northern heartlands”. My mother used to boil split peas for hours in a pudding cloth, until the kitchen was as hot and damp as a steam laundry. For anyone overcome by nostalgia for this frugal delicacy, Simon Hopkinson’s excellent recipe for split peas and ham hock in The Good Cook should do the Proustian trick. read more at telegraph.co.uk/opinion