Flying the Wainwrights
Some 214 hills make up England’s beautiful Lake District. Bagging them by foot is a popular past time for walkers, but no one had ever done them by air until Simon Blake took up the challenge…
In the far north west of England, in the county of Cumbria, lies an ancient landscape. Scoured over millennia by glaciers and scarred over centuries by industry, it’s been inspiration to poets, birthplace of modern rock-climbing, and magnet for lovers of mountains from all across the country and the world.
Here it was that Wordsworth wandered lonely as a cloud, Victorians with impressive moustaches pioneered improbable routes in tweeds and hobnail boots, and where, between the years of 1952 and 1965, an accountant named Alfred Wainwright spent his spare days walking and his nights hand-writing and illustrating his seven volume Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells.
Over thirteen years, at an average rate of a page a night, he wrote an extended love letter to these mountains, detailing in his idiosyncratic style every way up and down them he could find. He was, in a very real sense, obsessed. Those books became, for many, the standard reference work for walkers in the Lake District National Park, and have sold over two million copies.
Visiting all 214 of Wainwrights ‘fells’ has become a popular challenge for walkers in the district, although the whole culture of ‘bagging’ is something Wainwright himself would have frowned upon. Who knows what he would have thought of what I did last summer…
In 2012, Cumbria Soaring Club decided that bagging the fells by foot-launched glider (hangie, paraglider or speedwing) would make an interesting ongoing challenge. They drew up rules, defining what counted as “bagging” – fly out of, or through, a 200m-radius cylinder round each summit.
I’d bagged all these hills on foot in 2010, so the idea appealed immediately. But in 2012, I’d only just stepped up to an EN B glider (a GIN Sprint Evo), only just got my hands on my first miniwing (a GIN Bobcat), and only just started going XC. I hadn’t really flown in mountains – I lived a couple of hours away, and it was just too convenient to fly on little local hills instead. I wasn’t ready… but I had a plan, and started building my skills…
The full article is inside Cross Country 152 (March / April 2014)
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