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When we were locked down for coronavirus in 2020, the ‘Financial Times‘ filled its Travel section with features written from memory. This was mine…

23 April 2020. (Read the article on the FT website, with lots of great pictures, here.)

I’m running on a scree-strewn path in the Lake District, at the northern end of the broad, undulating ridge that zigzags from Great Dodd’s grassy dome to the rocky heights of Helvellyn. It’s 5:30am. I’ve been running through the fells for half the night, and the long hours of darkness have left me cold and empty. Yet now, just as I was giving up hope of morning, the horizon on my left has burst into flame. Forty miles to the east, shards of blinding sunrise flash though the spine of the Pennines. The Cumbrian fells soak up the daylight greedily. The dark turf beyond the path glows a deep pink, then shades in a few breaths through grey to green. Each rough clump has its own sharp shadow, each rock its intricately polychrome dusting of lichen. I keep jogging southwards, stumbling occasionally on the loose stones. On my left, the fresh daylight has revealed a vast, sleeping panorama of northern England. It looks like the promised land. There are valleys, villages, woods, hills, tiny but distinct, all freshly bathed in the peace of a spring morning, with webs of mist clinging to dark treetops. Somehow I force myself to focus most of my attention on where I am putting my feet, but I can’t stop thinking about that shocking glimpse of loveliness. Then I notice, between one leftward glance and the next, that the last traces of mist have been burnt away. The night’s self-pity vanishes with them. I can’t remember the darkness. I can barely remember unhappiness. I can feel the warmth on my sweat-drenched back, and the world seems so beautiful that I think my heart may break . . . 

OK, I’m not really writing this in the Lake District. How could I be? I’m locked down at home in Northamptonshire, while Cumbrians plead with tourists to stay away. I’m lucky, however: a whole circuit of fells around Keswick and Derwentwater is downloaded in my brain, in such depth and detail that I can take myself there at will. It’s a long story: too long to tell here. It goes back to the early 1990s, when my legs and lungs were young, and I began a long love affair — still smouldering — with fell-running. It’s an unusual passion, I admit; but it isn’t, as some suggest, a mad one. Running up and down rough, rocky mountainsides in all weathers is indeed hazardous and exhausting. It’s also exhilarating. Its finest practitioners combine the stamina, speed and agility of the Olympic elite with the boldness, mountaincraft and resilience of heroic adventurers. Also-rans like me stagger clumsily in their wake, yet even we experience the wild, liberating satisfaction that comes from testing your whole self — body, mind, soul — against the raw challenges of the fells. 

It’s a friendly sport, with deep roots in local cultures, whose pleasures are enhanced by being shared. It does result in occasional injuries, but if you’ve once enjoyed it, you tend to stay hooked for life. That’s mostly because it’s a mountain-lovers’ sport, whose richest gift is the need, while you’re doing it, to give the fells your complete attention. You must interrogate your surroundings, constantly, or bad things happen. Is that rock loose? Is that mud deep? How safe is that scree slope? How dense is that heather? How cold will it be on the summit? Can I find my way off again? The more you ask, the more you realise how much you were missing before, and the more the landscape seeps into your being. You don’t, to be honest, see many glorious views. My fell-running memory-bank is dominated by scenes in which I’ve been lost in cloud, or been cold, wet, frightened, exhausted or injured — or, as often as not, several of these at once. Somehow, like the ups and downs of a long marriage, this makes the relationship deeper. If I still long for the fells, despite everything, it must be love. 

My biggest fell-running obsession was a particular challenge involving 42 of the Lake District’s highest peaks which, strung together, form a 66-mile circuit, with 26,900ft of ascent and descent. The circuit starts and finishes at Keswick’s Moot Hall and for the past 88 years has been known as the Bob Graham Round. The challenge, which for most of us is even harder than it sounds, is to complete it, on foot, with witnesses, in less than 24 hours. My attempts to do so dominated five years of my life; and, I think, made me the person I am today. 

As a joyful bonus, I remember almost every detail of the route. I also remember the lore of the “BG” tradition, imbibed during long days on the hills and long recuperative evenings in friendly Cumbrian pubs. Bob Graham, a Keswick guesthouse-keeper, completed the circuit for the first time in June 1932, wearing plimsolls, baggy shorts and pyjama tops and fuelling himself with hard-boiled eggs. His Round’s mystique developed when others tried to replicate it, especially during the renaissance of outdoor adventure that followed the second world war. By the 1950s, the BG had developed an aura of near-impossibility, like climbing Everest or running a sub-four-minute mile — grails of endurance which, for some, overlapped. (Chris Brasher, Roger Bannister’s pacer in 1954, made three unsuccessful attempts at the BG.) All three challenges have since been tamed somewhat by repeated conquest — but remain stupendously difficult. The BG is a very British tradition, created by hardier generations than mine. The feats of its heroes are usually expressed in numbers — so many peaks, so many miles, so many hours and minutes — but the romance is in the texture: the weather, the threadbare clothes (until recently), the tortured joints, the indomitable resolve. Bob Graham’s successors included Joss Naylor, a Wasdale shepherd who completed several extended Bob Graham circuits — one of them during one of the worst storms of the 1970s — and ran all 214 peaks in Alfred Wainwright’s Pictorial Guides to the Lakeland Fells in a seven-day epic of bloody-minded, bloody-footed willpower that coincided with one of the fiercest heatwaves of the 1980s. His records have been superseded but still resonate, mainly because of their rugged reliance on stoicism and guts. There are some world-class athletes among the sponsored sky-runners pushing back the frontiers of fell-running today; but you’ll rarely see them deviate from record attempts, as Naylor sometimes did, to rescue lambs in distress.

 Naylor (now 84) was a hill farmer first and a runner second. He ran, initially, in work boots and long trousers cut off at the knee; he fuelled himself with cake and Guinness; he trained by covering long distances on foot, mainly in pursuit of his work. His intimate knowledge of the fells made up for his unsophisticated preparations. More importantly: he never gave up. Fell-runners speak with awe about the time he finished a run with two (unnoticed) broken feet; or when all 10 of his toenails fell off; or when ill-fitting shoes rubbed his ankles so badly that the ligaments were showing. No list of great British athletes of the 20th century should be considered complete without his name. 

It’s the same with other giants of the fells, such as Billy Bland, the Borrowdale stonemason whose 1982 record for the fastest Bob Graham Round stood for 36 years, or his rival Kenny Stuart, the light-footed Threlkeld gardener who “ran on scree as if it was Axminster” (as one rival put it) and set still-unbroken records for Ben Nevis and Snowdon. Their achievements were fitted around exhausting manual work and won them neither fame (except locally) nor fortune, yet they were two of the finest athletes of their era. When I retrace Bob Graham’s circuit — in real life or in imagination — I feel both humbled and empowered by the knowledge that I’m following the studded footsteps of better men and women than me: runners made from the same flesh and blood, challenged by the same gradients, ground and elements, who were somehow able to summon reserves of spirit beyond ordinary imaginings. If I’m heading up Skiddaw from Keswick, for example, I often think of Ernest Dalzell, an Ormathwaite gamekeeper whose suicidal descents at Grasmere and Burnsall made him a local legend in the years before the first world war. A little further out, on Great Calva, it’s Bill Teasdale who comes to mind: an impossibly durable Caldbeck farmer and gamekeeper who dominated the sport from the late 1940s to the 1960s — but worked on these slopes much more than he ran on them. Neither Dalzell nor Teasdale had any direct connection with Bob Graham, yet the circuit takes you through and past their patches, just as it later takes you through Stuart’s Threlkeld and (much later) Bland’s Borrowdale. Such landmarks remind me that the mountains — far more than pandemics — are great levellers, capable of humbling any one of us; yet also capable of eliciting, in certain hearts and circumstances, responses of astonishing courage and defiance. 

Cumbria’s hills often feel wild and desolate, but no one who explores them is an isolated adventurer. You always sense traces of others who have immersed themselves in the landscape before you. Which ones you sense — be it poets or painters, travel-writers or storytellers, naturalists, climbers or athletes — depends on taste and temperament. When I run down Scafell towards Wasdale Head and see the steep side of Yewbarrow bristling with bracken beyond, I imagine the sufferings of Chris Brasher, who (Olympic gold medal notwithstanding) threw up and gave up there in 1977, on his first BG attempt. Others associate this same slope with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who ascended Scafell from Wasdale in August 1802 before famously flirting with death climbing down via Broad Stand on the other side, on his way to Scafell Pike. Temporarily crag-bound, the poet “lay in a state of almost prophetic Trance & Delight” and “exclaimed aloud — how calm, how blessed am I now . . . ” Fell-runners recognise that ecstasy. 

Today’s young mountain athletes are typically inspired by figures such as Jasmin Paris (an Edinburgh vet who, in addition to holding the record for the fastest-ever BG by a woman, was overall winner of last year’s 268-mile Montane Spine Race through the Pennines) or Nicky Spinks (a Yorkshire farmer who in 2016 completed two BGs, back to back, in 45 hours 30 minutes). Others see Kilian Jornet, a Catalan full-time athlete who in 2018 ran the fastest BG of them all (an incomprehensible 12 hours 52 minutes), as the ultimate role-model. These are runners of a vintage far removed from my shepherds and gamekeepers: they have kit sponsors and energy gels and share their adventures on social media. But they, too, take strength from their kinship with the mountains: no one would put themselves through such agonies if they didn’t. 

The guardians of the Bob Graham tradition distrust the encroachments of modernity, shunning both publicity and money. Runners who complete the Round win nothing more lucrative than a certificate. Even so, creeping popularisation of the sport has led some to fear that the BG, like Everest, may become the kind of challenge that the rich and impatient “conquer” by throwing money at it. Earlier this year, the Bob Graham 24 Hour Club announced that it would “no longer accept applications for membership where paid-for or professional guided services have been used”.

A few hardliners go further and grumble that southern incomers are overrunning “their” hills. It’s a familiar complaint. Appreciating the life-enhancing qualities of the fells doesn’t always extend to wanting other lives to be enhanced by them. Even Wordsworth, who claimed to have found the “Wisdom and Spirit of the universe” in the Lakes and their hills, campaigned grumpily against plans for a railway to open them to the masses. You can see their point. Few mountain experiences are improved by a crowd of tourists. But although we southern fell-runners can understand the resentment of those who consider the fells their own back yard, we also know that they need us. According to the national park authorities, the Lake District depends on tourism for about 75 per cent of its employment. One day, for all our faults, they’ll want us back. 

But not today. For more than a month, the fells have been empty. Even local fell-runners are avoiding the higher ground when taking their socially distanced exercise, for fear of making avoidable demands on the health service or Mountain Rescue. Bob Graham Rounds attempted this year will not be ratified. 

Yet a landscape so rich in memory can never be wholly uninhabited. When I run my remembered routes in my head, there are always ghosts, just as there were when I ran them in real life. I don’t mean spooky apparitions, like the phantom soldiers that allegedly manifest themselves from time to time on the side of Blencathra, or the plague victims buried on the fell-sides during the 1597-98 pandemic known as the Great Visitation. My ghosts represent the spirits of people whose souls, like mine, have been changed by the fells: the hill-farmers, gamekeepers and foresters who helped make the landscape; the locals who lived, loved and died there; the poets and painters, and ordinary tourists, who sensed the sublime here; and, not least, the runners. 

There was, I imagine, a breathtaking view from the Helvellyn ridge when dawn broke this morning — although whether it was actually a view, if no one was there to see it, is a matter for philosophical debate. In my head, as I write this, I can see that same dawn exploding. At least one runner is there to witness it, picking his way carefully along the ridge. He is exhausted, cold and hungry, and his mind is mostly occupied with finding safe places to put his feet. He winces occasionally when a misjudged step jars a bruised joint. Yet he also snatches a glance, every now and then, at the bright world revealing itself around him. 

When he does so, he senses, like Coleridge, “the Invisible . . . like some sweet beguiling melody, so sweet, we know not we are listening to it”. And as he staggers on towards the next peak, he gives thanks from the depths of his heart. He knows how privileged he is to be out there.

https://www.ft.com/content/f21d1148-8309-11ea-b6e9-a94cffd1d9bf