I have never completed anything. Hill lists, I mean. I have done 140 or so Munros, a similar number of Wainwrights, a handful of Corbetts and Donalds. Finishing any of these lists seems a hazy aspiration that I might possibly achieve by the time I am in my sixties – or not…
But having received Rab Anderson’s The Pentland Hills for Christmas – it’s the ‘definitive guide’, apparently – my interest was piqued by the compilation of 157 ‘hills’, ‘tops’ and ‘rises’ that is listed at the back of the book. They range from the clangingly-obvious (Scald Law, Carnethy Hill, East Cairn Hill, etc) to the utterly pointless. In fact, a lot of them are utterly pointless. The ‘rises’, for instance, are arbitrarily defined as ‘high points which do not have a clear rise of at least 15 metres from the low point connecting them to the next point’. Some of these ‘rises’ are farcical, like Black Law South Top (three metres), Chuckie Knowe (five metres) and Lamb Rig (also five metres). You need to know the Pentlands very well to identify the location of those three.
It’s a hill list, though (and what hill list is perfect?), so I set about it, starting on January 1 on Black Hill (and a few more thereafter as part of a New Year’s Day round of the Pentlands 500s), and so I had assumed I would knock off the ‘Andersons’ in about three months. But then there were travel restrictions associated with another lockdown, that incredible six weeks of winter, a tooth extraction, a double leg fracture, a dog attack, and before I knew it autumn had cascaded into winter again, and simply completing the 157 in 2021 became the objective. (I should stress that my ambition was to summit all of the 157, even if I had been there before; I also do not claim to be the first to complete the list.)
I completed on Mendick Hill, a fitting finale on a hill that seems to have taken a step back from the rest, and thus the panorama is exceptional. It is better still to look out and know you have literally been everywhere. The journey there was also symbolic of the nature of the Andersons: negotiating cows and horses for two obscure tops on Sandy Hill (numbers 150 and 151), then up a ramp of grass to the gloriously-named Cockup (152) and across a shoulder of rough, lonely moor to the twin rises of Ingraston Hill (153 and 154). Ensuring Mendick Hill was last, I contoured around the summit on sheep trods to Little Mendick Hill (155), then clambered through bowed bracken to Mendick’s north-west top (156), and finally Mendick Hill itself.
Needless to say, it is not a route I would choose to do; nor will I ever do it again. Still, as I paused on the frozen crest of one of the finest, quietest hills in the Pentlands, I was glad to have stood on every one of those pointless – and not-so-pointless – summits. It was an education: to know the full richness and rawness of the Pentlands as I do now brings only joy.
Jonny Muir