Still in the cellar field! The discovery of two websites has affected my peak-bagging activity during the last couple of years. I discovered geocaching on 21 Feb 2007, when I was shown a mysterious plastic box on a ramble in Warwickshire. From that day, hiding and finding caches has become a hobby of mine (or obsession, as my wife would undoubtedly say). Actually, it fits in quite well with Marilyn bagging, as there are often caches near the summits of hills, or just off the paths used to climb them, so you can attempt both on the same trip. However, it does slow one down a little, and perhaps that's part of the reason why my Marilyn gain has fallen from a record (for me) of 76 in 2006, to 56 in 2007 and 35 in 2008. Another reason is that my nearest unclimbed top is now over 50 miles away, so geocaching helps give a purpose to my local walking. Indeed, I have visited many interesting places that I would never have known existed were it not for the fact that some local person who knew the area had placed a geocache there, and I looked it up on www.geocaching.com.
The other discovery was passed on by Darren Groutage, a fellow member of West Bromwich Mountaineering Club, and is a really useful, user-friendly site: www.hill-bagging.co.uk, on which you can record your progress and chase other peak-baggers' totals. It was this that gave me the impetus to finish visiting the historic and 1974 county tops of England and Wales. If you want some really crazy places to visit, you could try some of the unitary authority tops listed on this site. These new interests came together nicely when I spent a day in south-east England collecting Marilyns, county tops and several geocaches. It was on this trip that the 'fabulous' Botley Hill became my 300th Marilyn, after visiting the even more nondescript county top of Kent just down the road.
My five main highlights since I last wrote in have been:
With all these other interests to side-track me, I'm still on course to be the oldest to enter the Hall, sometime around 2025, although this is perhaps a risky thing to have as a target. One thing is for sure, you've got to get the good peaks and walks in before your legs and knees start to go.
