Click on the map for a list of Marilyns in that area. (This is still under construction so some lists are not completed yet)

Marilyn Bagging

The granddaddy of all hill-walking lists is the Munro's, a list of (currently) 277 Scottish mountains over 3,000 feet above sea level. The list was originally written by Sir Hugh Munro in 1891, and over the intervening years has become so well-known that even people outside hill-walking circles have heard of it.

Unfortunately Munro's list, venerable though it is, has a number of flaws:

i) It ignores the 3,000-footers of England and Wales.
ii) There is no definition of what constitutes a separate summit - the list therefore includes a number of "summits" which are merely points in flat, featureless (albeit 3,000-foot high) moorland that are marginally higher than the surrounding landscape.
iii) There's some damn good hills that are actually less than 3,000 feet high.

Many attempts have been made over the years to tackle these issues, with new lists being produced with frightening regularity – the Mosses, the Donalds, the Nuttalls, the Sweats, the Hewitts, the Bridges, the Grahams, the Yeamans. Yet it was 1992 before a list emerged that would address all of these issues and have the potential to challenge Sir Hugh's century-old hegemony - Alan Dawson's Marilyns.

Alan discarded the concept of absolute height, and concentrated instead on relative height - the distance one would have to descend in any direction before you started to reascend another hill of equal or greater height. This ensured that the hill should be prominent above the surroundings (and thus give you good views). Whilst his list was not the first to use reascent/relative height criteria (the Donalds and the Nuttalls use it, amongst others), it was the first to be based SOLELY on reascent criteria, with no minimum height restriction at all. In order to qualify a hill merely had to have 150 metres descent in all directions before you started to ascend another higher hill.

This widening of scope created the biggest hill list to date – currently 1552 hills are listed from Great Britain and the surrounding islands. Some famous and excellent hills are included that had previously been ignored by all bagging lists - Leith Hill and Worcestershire Beacon are two that spring to mind. You can get the full original list and subsequent updates from Alan's website.

Astonishingly, in these days when ascents of Ben Nevis are commonplace, the Marilyns are a challenge yet to be completed (although some people are only 5 hills away from doing it). However, we'd like to make it clear that it's not a challenge we're undertaking. No, definitely not. Honest injuns & all that, the Scottish hills are just to far away, it would be too time consuming and expensive. Maybe just the English & Welsh marilyns then... aargh, what am I saying? On the other hand, if there's one in the area where we're walking, it seems a shame not to bag it...