County Top Bagging (Including Unitary Authorities)

With the end of the LOOP in sight, and we were casting around for a new walking challenge. Having completed one long distance path, we wanted to do something completely different. I happened to come across some websites about hill bagging and was instantly entranced by the idea. I loved views and open hilltops, and wanted to go out and climb them all.

But hang about, there's a lot of hills in Britain… we couldn't possibly do them all… and what exactly constituted a hill anyway? We didn't want to go around calling at houses and asking if we could climb their compost heaps just because they were marginally higher than the surrounding vegetable patch and hence gave a splendid view of a row of cabbages and a pyramid of bean canes. What we needed was a list.

Further web research ensued, and revealed the existence of a plethora of lists. There were the revered and ancient Munros, the Corbetts, the Hewitts, the Nuttalls, the Donalds and the Wainwrights. Then there were the Bridges and the Mosses, which seemed to be generally out of date and out of fashion. And last, but certainly not least, was that king of all lists, Alan Dawson's Marilyns, which is so difficult and comprehensive that no-one has completed it (yet!).

These were all fascinating (especially the uncompleted Marilyns) but all unsuitable for us for one very good reason - they were heavily orientated towards Scotland and the Lake District. As we live in the South East, aren't rich and lack the time to travel so far away, all of these challenges were unsuitable for us.

There was only one list which ensured a fair distribution of hills across the nation and therefore met our requirements - and that challenge was to go to the highest point in every county. On reflection we decided to exclude the counties of Scotland and restrict our challenge to England and Wales, for the same reasons as above. We were also a little aggrieved at Sir Hugh Munro excluding England and Wales from his list, and felt that we were getting our own back in some obscure way.

That was only the start of the story, for further researches showed that our counties have changed throughout the course of history. A LOT! Some people out there were tackling the tops of the current bizarre mix of counties and unitary authorities. Some were doing the post-1974 county tops. Others were tackling the pre-1974 tops. We decided to cut through the whole tangled mess and do 'em all. That's right, the highest point in every county that has ever existed. And so off we went… we meant to start with the London top, to celebrate finishing the LOOP, but somehow ended up doing Reading Unitary Authority instead.

FOOTNOTE: We're very much indebted to other websites from which we've shamelessly stolen data to compile our list - these are all shown in our links page. We're especially grateful to Simon Edwardes for his excellent website, which provided the only complete list of tops for the new unitary authorities. However, almost all of the pre-1974 tops have been discovered through our own research, and we're trying to capture our own grid references (when we remember!) as we complete each top. You're all welcome to use these in your own lists, but please link back to our website - let us know and we'll link to yours too.