Climbing mountains in England
Summit of Mt Snowden - Photo: Will Lambert
Driving through England and Wales and Scotland in March is flat and grey and boring. It is wet and windy and literally freezing cold while the landscape varies from flat and grey, to flat and muddy, to flat and grey again, and then… you get it. The cities are uniform and monotonous – every lane looks like Coronation street and everything is made from red brick made grey by the rain.
In the country side, the rain has turned the soil liquid and crumbling stone fences slick with rain vanish into the misty distance. Depressed by the weather and monochrome landscape you wonder if maybe it’s so flat and muddy because they cut down all the trees and dug up all the stone to make stuff.
Protected from the weather in parkas, coats and scarfs the people shaped by this environment seem all the same as if they were all cloned or produced from the same genetic mold. They appear pale, short and bulky in their layers with red noses or faces flushed from the cold wind or the alcohol they probably require to survive in these adverse conditions. And where is everyone? Aren’t there supposed to be 50 odd million people living here and history and stuff. The country appears empty, apart from a few cars that pass by, drivers hunched over steering wheels – are they all at home drinking tea? Then you stop in a small village. It has five buildings, three of which are pubs. Inside you find the population of England; warm, friendly, and drinking beer…..at 10:30am….on Tuesday.
The cities, towns and farms and weather may be monotonous, but then you get to the mountains and it’s different.
Well not actually much different. It’s still freezing cold, muddy, wet and grey, but ancient mountains dwarf the landscape. These giant structures are mostly granite, formed as sedimentary rock under the poles 2000 million years ago. Pushed up and transported by plate tectonics and eroded by the weather they are an impossible contrast to the previous days of driving. The rain washes these giants, pouring off them in waterfalls and becks (streams) and the clouds mist about the summits like the thin white hair of some senior citizen.
Wearing almost all the clothing I flew 35 hours around the world with - just to stay warm.
Climbing these mountains in this weather can be hard. It takes hours of continuous physical effort up and down and just to stay warm. It’s so cold I am wearing almost everything I brought with me from the other side of the world, including the stuff I had to pay extra for and put in another bag. My nose is running and my face is wind burnt. The frigid environment has molded me into one of the clones I saw before. It rains and it snows and sometimes it hails, but it is always windy.
Oh well, nothing worth doing is easy. The difficulty adds value to the accomplishment, but perhaps what is the best is that it’s not flat and grey and muddy and wet and monotonous… it’s muddier, wetter and greyier, but at least it’s not flat.
