Friends who went up a hill and came down a mountain
THREE ramblers have elevated an English hill to mountain status after they remeasured it at just three-quarters of an inch above the required height.
At 1,998ft, Thack Moor in the Cumbrian Pennines officially fell two feet short of being a mountain on Ordnance Survey maps.
But armed with state-of-the-art GPS technology, John Barnard, 63, Graham Jackson, 62, and 53-year-old Myrddyn Phillips set out to challenge the ruling.
They twice climbed the hill, 12 miles north of Penrith, and measured its height at 609.62 metres – a fraction over the necessary 2,000ft.
The Ordnance Survey has checked the new data and confirmed it will now amend its maps and listings, meaning Thack Moor will become England’s 254th mountain.
This is good news for the local tourism industry because it means more hikers are likely to visit.
Graham said: “It took us a while to find the absolute highest point of Thack Moor which we did by taking various readings. The summit is a patch of short grass and moss.”
John and Graham are retired research chemists from Mold, north Wales, while Myrddyn is a former printing firm manager who lives near Shrewsbury. They have spent five years checking the height of British hills that are close to mountain status, using GPS gear costing £5,000.
In 2008 they got Mynydd Graig Goch in Snowdonia reclassified as a mountain.
Their achievements mirror the 1995 film The Englishman Who Went Up A Hill But Came Down a Mountain, starring Hugh Grant, in which Welsh villagers raise a hill’s height by building a cairn to make it a mountain.