Anne at the head of Mosedale >
Does your
mountain
measure up?
John Nuttall takes steps to fi nd out
A
ugust, the month when MPs go on
holiday, presents a problem for
newspapers as suddenly they have
empty pages to fi ll. That may explain
why one day our book, The Mountains of
England and Wales, came to be in all the
national newspapers and why we were
entertaining Granada News in our back
garden. It may come as a surprise, but
a new mountain has been discovered in
the Lake District. Surely not, you say,
hasn’t every inch of the National Park
been explored already and more books
and articles published on this delightful
corner of the world than the rest of all the
National Parks put together.
Well in the Northern Fells, tucked away
out of site, off the beaten track and seldom
visited, lies Miller Moss. I know, it seems
a crazy name for a mountain. Really it
ought to be called Little Lingy Hill, but due
to the sometimes strange and mysterious
actions of the Ordnance Survey that name
had been applied to an area that defi nitely
isn’t a mountain. So there’s a mountain
with the name of a bog and a nearby bog
with the name of a hill.
But how could there be a new mountain
anyway? It all comes down to precision
surveying by our friends Graham Jackson
and John Barnard. We fi rst got to know
them when they appealed to us for help
in getting Ordnance Survey cartographers
to talk to them about a mountain in
Yorkshire. Both keen amateur surveyors
were convinced there was an error on the
10 Outdoor focus | spring 2019
The Mountains of England and
Wales by John and Anne Nuttall
is published by Cicerone Press
current OS map which gave the summit
of Birks Fell as 608 metres, but they had
measured it as 610m (2000ft). The OS
Press Offi ce came to my assistance and a
couple of hours later I had a call from an
intrigued Head of Geodetic Surveys. He
had checked the old maps and said my
friends were right and they would update
their maps.
We made our amends to Birks Fell,
not just by paying a visit – we’d been
there anyway, but by camping on the
summit. Dawn the next day was perfect
with all the moors a glorious orange
then, while we were packing up, a solitary
walker appeared. ‘I had to come’ he said,
‘The Nuttall’s website says this is a new
mountain’. He didn’t seem at all surprised
by fi nding us there. If you have a blog
you will no doubt be pleased when you
have followers, but we were beginning to
realise what a lot of people were literally
following us.
Promotion is fi ne, but what about
relegation? How do you celebrate a
mountain not being a mountain? The
answer is that you have a Wake on the
summit. So on a gloomy rainy day a
small party of friends headed up onto the
Berwyn mountains. On fi nally reaching
the summit our friend Eryl read his poem
- Ode to Cadair Bronwen - specially written
for the occasion. (See inset above.)
Over the years we have tagged along
on some of the surveys, braving wind and
rain on the summits, though rather a lot