Trigs and Marylins

Trig points and Marilyns

In Scotland you have Munro’s (see below) and in the Lake District there’s the Wainwrights (include description). There’s the Three Peaks but this would be too short lived and one cannot ride over Scafell Pike anyway, so that’s out the window. What can I do?

I can’t quite recall at what point I came to this way of thinking; only to say it was sometime earlier this year. Although that would be disingenuous, as I suspect it has been a concept growing in my mind for some time. It materialised in to a tangible plan sometime between the end of lockdown one and the start of L.2 - what started off with a blog about my local hill became a fascination with the term Marilyn.

- Marilyn: a mountain or hill with over 150 meters of prominence located in Britain, Ireland, and the Isle of Man. The name is derived from a play on words, based on the first name of a famous American actress and the well-known "Munro" peak list of Scotland (www.peakbagger.com).

Compounded by lockdown, a growing disconnect with my bike has fueled the need for a new challenge. A different angle to the rather monotonous fare that makes up my current two-wheeled environment. I don’t want to become just another stereotypical weekend warrior, riding the same trails and bridleways week in, week out; although, that in itself, at the moment, would be a small blessing. I need a significant change of scenery or I need the current scenery to take on renewed light. I am in search of a new challenge or some other purpose to my mountain biking.

For me, the thing about riding local and, in most cases, solo during the initial lockdown and, subsequently, through the rest of the year is that my local trails are fairly tame. In time, they get boring. Although I live not too far from the Cotswold escarpment, it is just far enough to warrant vehicular assistance; thus avoiding the 20km there and back by road. With the exception of Bredon Hill, a Cotswolds outlier, which is in reach from my front door, this was not practicable during lockdown.

By comparison, my local trails, with the exception of Bredon Hill and, to a lesser extent, Dumbleton Hill, are pretty flat and technically, very…. un-technical; and, by local, I mean from my front door (#nocarnognarnotfar) and of a c.10-15km radius. I originate from Winchcombe some 15 miles from where I currently live and I am naturally drawn back to the myriad steeper, more technical trails around the escarpment and those more remote trails deep within the centre of the Cotswolds. Lockdown was pretty torturous in this regard but, as most mountain bikers will attest, I muddled through with what was at my door.

 But, that yearning for better trails has not gone away and, even if you removed the whole Covid-19 blanket from this storey, I’m not sure that renewed riding in the cotswolds would satisfy, as good as it can be. So I did some research. I googled. The nearest Marilyn classified prominences to my home include:
* Worcester Beacon;
* Bredon Hill;
* Cleeve Common;

The three above, I have ridden to their summit numerous times. Others I can tick off include:
* Beacon Batch, Somerset;
* Black Mountain, Brecon Beacon’s.

There are, however, many more. In researching, I found that there are several hills nearby that don’t classify despite being taller than 150m. Either due to their not being a single prominence or their prominence being undermined by adjoining high ground.

I started paying attention to the OS map spot heights of my local hills and this has, subsequently, led me down a rabbit warren landing on the noble past-time of trig-bagging.

 

 

 

Whole. New. World

A quick scan of my small collection of OS maps has revealed a new prism through which to view the local landscape. Linking up sections of, otherwise, redundant or isolated sections of bridleway puts a new emphasis on the local trail network and has enabled me to put together some new routes previously untried.

While this may satiate my needs for the short-term, it will be short lived. Once I have ticked off local trig points, those routes and sections of Bridleway will again become isolated and redundant. However, I am planning longer term with this new interest.

So, I’m going to take up trig-bagging and, unlike most ‘bagger’s’, who do so by foot, I am going to use my mountain bike. This will be a key rule - I have to get there by bike.  Many of the local trig points will be easy enough to reach as most lack any really significant elevation but I have no intention of stopping there. My real aim from the start of all this was more aspirational. I want to ride some mountains, which leads me back to the Marilyns.

The OS built some 6500 trig points across the UK. Whilst some 300 have been lost and some are now inaccessible due to their being on private land, some also fall short of the original aspiration due to their proximity to roads and car parks, making them far too easy to ‘collect’. Depending on how well I get on, maybe I will come back to them one day but, for now, my focus will be on those that offer a challenge, in some way or another - be that because they sit atop a significant prominence, such as Snowden summit (1,086m), for example, or simply because I am able to formulate a suitable bike ride that encompasses them. Simply driving up to them and taking a photo feels a bit lame and falls short of what I am aiming for.  In doing so, I hope to collect several Marilyns along the way but I will be starting with those on the Landranger maps I initially poured over - lets ease in to this.

This is the trig point at the top of Snowshill (S5018). It sits along the Cotswold Way between Snowshill and Stumps Cross and offers views of Cleeve Hill, the Malverns and Broadway.

This is the trig pillar at Blakes Hill (S3802), which is just off the A46 at Aston Somerville, near Evesham. It sits within a small fenced copse with views of Bredon Hill, Dumbleton Hill and Snowshill

 

- Ordnance Survey Trig Points: Ordnance Survey Triangulation Station - triangulation pillar is the more formal term for the concrete columns found in the UK, however, the informal term, "trig point", is used more often. Represented by the little blue triangles on an OS Landranger maps. They tend to exist at the high point of a at the top of a

Ben Nevis, at 1344m, tops the list for highest trig pillar.
(wiki).

- Munro: a mountain located in Scotland with a height over 3,000 feet (914.4 m), although Topographical prominence is not a specific requirement, and which features on the Scottish Mountaineering Club (SMC) official list of Munros. They are named after Sir Hugh Munro, 4th Baronet (1856–1919), who produced the first list of such hills; the publication of which is usually considered to be the epoch event of modern peak bagging (wiki).

- Wainwrights: are the 214 peaks (known locally as fells) described in Alfred Wainwright's seven-volume Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells (1955–66). They all lie within the boundary of the Lake District National Park in Cumbria, and all but one (Castle Crag) are over 1,000 feet (304.8 m) in height (wiki).