Palace How Farm and Grasmoor...

“Wainwrights? I’ve done them all”, he bragged. I waited to hear a few choice anecdotes about his peak-bagging exploits. I waited in vain. A few words of encouragement seemed in order. “That’s a great achievement”, I lied. “You must have so many stories”. Well, apparently he hadn’t. Instead of providing a few memorable moments, the climbing of AW’s peaks – all 214 of them – had left him with no tales worth the telling. Imagine going to all that trouble, and having so little to show for it. “It’ll be something to tell the grandchildren”, he said, unconvincingly, suggesting that climbing the Wainwights isn’t something to do; it’s something to have done. The pleasure comes only in retrospective.

Peak bagging is something I don’t really understand. But there are so many other things that I don’t understand (mobile phone tariffs, double entry book-keeping, our seemingly endless fascination with the fluctuating fortunes of Marks & Spencer... the list is long, and getting longer) that one more barely registers on my personal Richter scale of incomprehension.

When we walk we have the opportunity to question – perhaps even undermine – the work ethic that rules so many aspects of our lives. Work implies order, efficiency, time & motion, making the best use of the time available to maximise profits and minimise costs. But so ingrained is this work ethic that we bring it onto the fells too. Looking to make most productive use of our free time, we give ourselves targets to achieve and ‘personal bests’ to be bettered. Miles must be logged, peaks must be bagged, boxes must be ticked; this isn’t recreation, it’s accountancy.

I certainly don’t understand the urge to climb every lakeland mountain, then tick a box, then bag another peak, then tick another box, and carry on like this until you’ve run out of summits, or boxes, or both. Once you’re a fully paid-up member of the peak-baggers’ club, and ticked off all the Wainwrights, what do you do next? Head north to tackle the Munroes? Start climbing the Wainwrights again from scratch? Or retire to a comfy chair by the fireside, and wait optimistically for the grandchildren to show even the tiniest flicker of interest in your fell-walking exploits of so very long ago?