UKH

Ben Aslak on Skye and Ladylea have been demoted apparently both measuring in at 1998ft.

Not that it really means much other than a change of hill list.

http://www.hill-bagging.co.uk/index.php

In reply to fmck:

Demoted by whom? Who is the ''keeper'' of the Grahams list? And has the Ordnance Survey accepted this news as fact?

In reply to allanscott:

Don't know if you have heard but they have a device these days called " global positioning system" or simply GPS. This device can measure position including height to within roughly 50mm probably closer since I used it on a wind farm 7 years ago.
The result is there is now a growing market of sados out there checking the previously unreliable summit heights. Feel free to hire a GPS kit if you dispute the claim but who cares really, there still there!

In reply to fmck:

On behalf of the pedants you're slagging off can I just say, it's 'they're still there'. happy to have been of assistance.

If everyone takes a stone up, they can build a 2 foot high cairn per Hugh Grant's attempt in Wales. Then the hill will be the correct height again

In reply to fmck:

It's a fair bit more complicated than that, I don't think a handheld GPS would give you a reliable result. See this recent UKH article on an amateur group re-surveying the height of Snowdon: http://www.ukhillwalking.com/articles/page.php?id=6734

In reply to Dan Bailey - UKHillwalking.com:

I don't think any surveyor would ever consider a hill walkers GPS as an accurate piece of measuring equipment.
These guys are humping up the hill your full surveyors kit. Normally a base station and tripod and separate pole with receiver. I had the luck of using a land rover to take my kit up the hill wouldn't like the joy of carrying though. Strange hobby.

In reply to Dan Bailey - UKHillwalking.com:

To be fair to fmck, he(?) didn't mention handheld GPS, and reading between the lines of his post ('50mm', 'wind farm', 'hire kit'), it was clear to me that he meant surveying GNSS kit, not consumer. But maybe that's because I know a bit more about GNSS than the average bunny...

In reply to captain paranoia:

More than me, for sure.

In reply to Dan Bailey - UKHillwalking.com:

There's a good article on the surveying methods used here: http://www.hills-database.co.uk/TMS_heighting_accuracy.pdf
The Ladylea and Ben Aslak surveys were done by Alan Dawson using a similar piece of kit.

The Database of British and Irish Hills at http://www.hill-bagging.co.uk/ has become the de facto standard for hill lists other than Munros (+ Tops and Furths) and Corbetts which are still "kept" by the SMC, who have been rather slow at keeping up with resurveys (e.g. the Corbetts list at http://www.smc.org.uk/corbetts/CorbettsTable.php still has Carn Liath listed instead of Creag an Dail Bheag despite the latter be surveyed as higher over a year ago).

In reply to Dan Bailey - UKHillwalking.com:

They use professional surveying kit - diffential GPS. Not handhelds. They have worked with the OS, in the past.

Never mind 2000' - are they still "marylins"?


Oh and in another post the term saddo was used - please dont.

In reply to Fat Bumbly2:

Ok suppose that was a bit strong. I look at a train as means to get home some folks see something different. Wrong term to use.

BTW : What's a Marylin ?

In reply to fmck:

I dunno. What's a hump?
http://www.scottishhills.com/html/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopi...

In reply to malky_c:

HUndred Metre Prominence i.e. any summit with >100m of re-ascent (as opposed to 150m for Marilyns).

In reply to fmck:


Don't be cheeky. I have heard of GPS - even use one occasionally.

Didn't know about Carn Liath/Creag an Dail Beag though.

The wonders of modern technology eh. What would Sir Hugh make of it all? Probably wish he'd never started it all!

In reply to malky_c:


Generally most folks hillwalking will be aware of what Marilyns or HuMPs are.

Let me explain : I asked what a Marylin (as he spelled it) was. Get it! Get it!

Maybe not.

BTW : What is it with you keep putting links to a web site I haven't been on since 2010! I wouldn't even remember where to find that link even though I wrote the post years ago. This is not the first time and my concern is your OCD with numbers/lists may be manifesting itself into something else as a side line.

Stop being so flamin creepy!

In reply to fmck:


I'm a hillwalker, but I don't know what humps or Marilyns are. I'm aware of Munros and Corbetts, but they don't have a great deal of influence where I walk, since I'm not an obsessive list-ticker.

In reply to captain paranoia:


As someone who has researched and written about this kind of stuff a fair bit over the years, I think HuMPs/Humps are far less widely known within the general hillbagging community than are Marilyns (and even those aren't as well known as the core Marilynbagging people sometimes seem to assume). Goodness knows how many people are actively bagging Humps, but it's not very many and most of them will have moved on from Marilynbagging in a postgrad kind of way.

To my eyes it appears (perhaps wrongly) that there's a sort of "list too far" boundary for a lot of people, and while Marilyns have come to be on the accepted, canonical side of the boundary, Humps - thus far at least - are on the outside. Beyond them are massive categories such as Tumps, Sims, Kirks and various others which effectively play the role of outer planets in the bagging solar system.

I'm pretty sure that the two most popular hill bagging lists in the UK - by some distance - are Munros and Wainwrights. Next perhaps come Corbetts and a composite of the various England/Wales 2000ers lists. Then probably a group containing Donalds, Grahams and Marilyns. County Tops / Council Tops have long been canonical in that there's a logic to doing them that extends beyond normal hillbagging mentalities, but they've never been very popular all the same.

Incidentally, this very day I was at a pleasant - both in terms of company and weather - gathering to mark a 1000th same-Marilyn ascent. This was by Lindsay Munro on Birnam Hill (which I think he said he first climbed in 1999) and neatly his wife Janet was climbing it for the 100th time. Lindsay's the third person known to have achieved the "triple crown" of 1000 Munros, 1000 different Marilyns and 1000 ascents of the same Marilyn - where the rule, such as this thing has rules, is that to avoid double-counting the 1000-ascent Marilyn has to be either a non-Munro or, if it is a Munro, the person needs to have racked up 1000 other Munros as well as the 1000-times one. If you see what I mean. (The first triple-crownee was Richard Wood.)

In reply to Dave Hewitt:


Marilyns are a 'list too far' for me, but I get your point about people having their own boundary. I shouldn't really but Tumps, Sims, Kirks? Never heard of them, I am almost certain they'll join the Marilyns as far as I'm concerned but can you enlighten us? It would seem the committed list ticker has an impossible task

In reply to allanscott:
Sir Hugh - who walked miles with the tech of his day to clear up confusion on the then poor mapping would be out there with a differential GPS.
He was the Tamperer of the 1890s.

Dave - missed the Birnam walk, thought I could manage it last week, but still too far for me. Bloody waiting list!

In reply to drmarten:


http://www.hill-bagging.co.uk/

Not sure about the Kirks (Dave?), but the others are there.


What, like 16781 Tumps?

In reply to drmarten:


There are others on here with greater knowledge of the outer-limits stuff than I have (eg FB2 on this thread knows his stuff), as I've sort of drawn my own line in research terms and have come to regard Tumps, Sims etc as beyond my remit. But at risk of getting it wrong, I think Tumps are what are also known as P30 summits - anything with 30m or more of all-round drop (anywhere in the UK I think, but not sure); Sims are 600m high with 30m of drop:
http://www.rhb.org.uk/sims/simhof.html
while Kirks, if I recall correctly, have 10m (!) of drop and the list is forever destined to be a work in progress. The Database of British and Irish Hills notes page is a good place to visit for list definitions:
http://www.hills-database.co.uk/database_notes.html
Needless to say there are lots of overlaps between these lists - it's Venn Diagram territory.

Incidentally, as I've written elsewhere, one thing that's odd about all this is that these are all drop-only lists, and distance has gone completely out of fashion as a factor. This I find rather puzzling - partly because separation includes various factors of which both drop and distance are major ones and measurable, and also partly because there's a yawning gap in the market for a few Percy Donald-style lists that try and handle both drop and distance - but no one seems to be up for the challenge of compiling such things.

In reply to Dave Hewitt:


Given the availability of digital terrain data, it sounds like a relatively trivial task for an automated search. Admittedly, the 30m linear resolution of a DTED level 2 database may not be up to the job, especially if you're looking for drops as small as 10m...

In reply to drmarten:


I'm not actively bagging Marilyns but if I happen to be near one I'll often visit it. The 150m prominence means that even the small ones can have great views, and be worth a detour.

In reply to petestack/Dave Hewitt:

Thanks for those replies, I wasn't aware that hill lists extended to this degree
It would seem compiling the lists might be a lifetimes work, never mind actually reaching the top of the hills concerned. I am destined never to enter the SIM corridor but I can live with that.

In reply to drmarten:

I'm now a recovering bagger of sorts since finding out that being obsessive about lists and numbers is mental illness. Its a common condition with OCD similar like a spotter lists numbers off things be it a train, plane, etc. They get obsessive about numbers.

I don't know what a Tump or kirk is and I don't want to know either. Worse than crystal meth this stuff!

In reply to drmarten:


While I can see the point of listing stuff like Marilyns, HuMPs and Sims, I've no plans to start ticking them off systematically. But Tumps with no qualifying base height and (quite incredibly if they're what Dave thinks they are) Kirks do rather sound like lists too far!

In reply to petestack:


There's a acknowledgement in the Database of British and Irish Hills to "John Kirk for reviewing our P20 lists" - ie lists of hills with 20m of prominence/drop. This in itself is a whole step beyond what's become the standard 30m (or 100ft in old money) lists - although remember that the popular Nuttalls lists for England and Wales opt for P15.

Years ago (late 1990s or thereabouts) I was sent a self-published ringbinder-type thing from John Kirk which in due course I passed on (to Alan Dawson, I think). It wasn't a list of the whole UK, just part - Scottish islands if I recall correctly - but was intended as the first part of a full UK list. As I say, I'm not entirely sure as it's a good few years ago, but I'm reasonably sure this was an attempt at a P10 list.

In reply to Dave Hewitt:



Do you think this is maybe something gone beyond hillwalking and has maybe progressed into something more psychological?

In reply to fmck:


Well, some would say that everything's psychological at least to an extent. Clearly there is a whole list-compiling/ticking thing that has long been going on in the hillwalking world - and also in the climbing one, as there are plenty of discussions along those lines on this site. Personally I wouldn't use the term OCD as you did upthread - rather there's a debate to be had about where various of the hill-list people (and I include myself in this) are on what seems to have become known in trendy education / social work circles as "the Asperger's spectrum".

But I think what you said earlier runs the risk of extrapolating from your own "recovering bagger" experience to a less convincing argument about baggers in general. My experience from having hung about with such people for the past few decades is that they're a very varied bunch, and to try and throw a general description or definition over them isn't really fair or feasible. It's a bit like the old "bobble hat" rambler stereotype of years gone by - sure, you could fairly quickly find a bobble-hatted rambler if you went looking, but you'd also find that most of them were wearing other types of headgear.

To take just one example re the actual hill-list thing, the two recent Marilyn completers, Rob Woodall and Eddie Dealtry, are both rounded individuals with plenty of interests beyond basic hill bagging, and they're very different characters from each other (which is part of why I was so pleased that they were the first two to wrap up the list). So any attempt to generalise those two, beyond self-evident things such as their both being driven and focused and having high levels of fitness and technical competence, feels likely to fall at a whole variety of hurdles.

In reply to Dave Hewitt:

Jeez that was a bit long winded.

Being a varied bunch is what being human is but....

Standing looking around at the view while a group of people chant "Hof, Hof, Hof Hof" while beating a trig point at a faster and faster rate is probably the closest I have come to "The world of the strange"