Best Outdoor Feature Norman Hadley
Handing on the Torch
Fell runner and backpacker Norman Hadley shares a beautiful reflection on what it means to inherit and pass on a love of the outdoors .
Mountains humble us . Whenever we stand in a corrie scooped out over millennia , from strata laid down over hundreds of millions of years , we face the Big Truth : we are but mayflies dancing on the skin of a tarn .
We can shrug with resignation at this . Or , if we have the fortune to meet someone we fancy the pants off , we can make our tiny gesture of love and hope and defiance , and make new humans to take our place .
The years will pass , in a haze of oxytocin and exhaustion . You ’ ll turn the pages of the book , saying : “ D . O . G . dog C . A . T . cat ”. Then later , perhaps , you might find yourself murmuring “ this is a dragonfly , this is a guyline , that is Blencathra .”
You want them to see what you see , and to love what you love , but you know it ’ s only a gift if it ’ s given freely and taken gladly . They must be able to turn away from wild places and seek out more sybaritic pleasures in the worlds of the games console , the pizza parlour or the nightclub . Maybe they ’ ll come back to the wild places , maybe not . The first lesson about our children is they are not ours .
GENESIS
You may find yourself looking back at how you got into outdoor life . I was lucky : I was born into a fell walking family . I was carried for the first two years , growing plump as a miniature Buddha in the papoose . I was then set down in the sky-high bracken on my chubby legs and advised to walk . Someone up at the front of the party had the sandwiches and there was talk of a sweet at the summit , so I had ample motivation to keep up .
From the start , I loved it . I climbed Skiddaw at two , scampering around the heather in a romper suit , running down and body-surfing on my belly like a penguin . By four , I was tackling the Scafells from Eskdale and trotting round the Fairfield Horseshoe in hand-me-down wellies . This felt natural to me - I knew no different . By seventeen , I felt ready to expand from the Lakeland fells to the
Highlands . My first solo outing began early one midsummer morning , alighting from the train at Achnashellach Station . I ranged across to Torridon over the lonely summits of Fuar Tholl and Sgorr Ruadh , before taking a circuitous tour of the Cuillin and Kintail . Wherever I descended to a glen with a phone box , I fulfilled my filial duties and rang home to say I was still alive . I was aware of parental anxiety at a literal level - I could repeat , if asked , that they were worried for me . But I didn ’ t really understand . How could I ?
WE COME , WE GO
The years passed . Time took my mother in the same year my daughter arrived in an act of cosmic recompense . The universe giveth and it taketh away . We carried Mum ’ s ashes to the top of a Lakeland fell . Flowers shivered their petals like prayer flags on a Tibetan pass . The years passed some more .
I introduced our kids to some of the smaller fells . Then I took them wild camping , the three of us squeezed into a Saunders Fellpacker at top of Far Easedale
18 OUTDOOR FOCUS Winter 2024 – 25