Wainwright’s ‘forgotten fells’ of the Lakes return to the shelves

Described in some detail by the legendary fell walker, guidebook writer and illustrator Alfred Wainwright, but not among the 214 peaks to which he lent his name, it has remained a handwritten footnote in the topography of Northern England.

But the republication after several years out of print of one of Wainwright’s lesser-known guides could see a new generation of tourists sampling the region’s “forgotten fells”.

The Wainwright Society, which has existed since 2002 to perpetuate the 40-plus works of its patron, has chosen the 90th anniversary of his first visit to his beloved Lakes, to re-release his 1974 volume, The Outlying Fells of Lakeland. Its reappearance also coincides with the reopening of the area to tourists.

Wainwright produced the book as a “mopping-up” exercise to account for the 110 named fells and summits that did not make the cut in his seven earlier pictorial guides to the Lakes, produced from 1952 in his own handwriting.

The Bannisdale Horseshoe, which he described as a “dark pyramid of heather and bracken and outcrops of rock”, north of Kendal and on the eastern fringe of the National Park, was among those he appeared determined to document.

His protégé, retired cartographer Chris Jesty, spent a year revisiting the outlying fells for a revised version in 2011 but even that had fallen out of print.

In the intervening years, the creation of new footpaths through the area had transformed access to the fells, though not their character, said Mr Jesty, who assisted Wainwright with the maps on two of his later books.

“I enjoy the outlying fells more – they’re less crowded and easier to climb,” he said.

But he remained in awe of the originals. “It would have taken me 100 years to do all the work Wainwright did. And the most remarkable thing is that he did it all in the evenings and at weekends, in between his full time job as town treasurer of Kendal.”

Wainwright himself said that he regarded his book on the outlying fells as “a late bonus for old age pensioners” who had enjoyed the fells in years gone by and were reluctant to put away their boots and call it a day.

It retained delights of its own, he wrote. The 836ft Beacon Fell in the western Lakes, though not among the 214 celebrated “Wainwrights” of the area, was “among the most delectable of the lesser heights” and “an epitome of all that appeals to fell walkers”.

Mr Jesty, who lives in Kendal, not far from Wainwright’s old house, said that despite the intermittent availability of some of his titles, they had never gone out of fashion.

“It’s his attention to detail and the quality of his writing that make his books stand out as the best of their kind. There’s been no-one like him,” he said.

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