Notes from a Small Island

Written by American author Bill Bryson (first published in 1995), this is a humorous (laugh out loud) travel book about what he liked about the country so much.

There is a brilliant passage on male toilet humour that is actually hysterical and a true but not so complimentary encounter in North Wales, but the following excerpt sums up the reason why so many people actually enjoy trekking in Britain.

I remember when I first came to Britain wandering into a book store and being surprised to find a whole section dedicated to 'Walking Guides'. This struck me as faintly bizarre and comical - where I came from people did not as a rule require written instructions to achieve locomotion - but then gradually I learned that there are, in fact, two kinds of walking in Britain, namely the everyday kind that gets you to the pub, and all being well back home again, and the more earnest type that involves stout boots, Ordinance Survey maps in plastic pouches, rucksacks with sandwiches and flasks of tea, and, in this terminal phase, the wearing of khaki shorts in appropriate weather.

For years, I’ve watched these walker types toiling off up cloud-hidden hills in wet and savage weather and presumed they were genuinely insane. And then my old friend John Price, who had grown up in Liverpool and spent his youth doing foolish things on sheer-faced crags in the Lakes, encouraged me to join him and a couple of his friends for an amble – that was the word he used – up Haystacks one weekend. I think it was the combination of those two untaxing-sounding words, ‘amble’ and ‘Haystacks’ that lulled me from my natural caution.

‘Are you sure that it’s not too hard?’ I asked.

‘Nah, just an amble,’ John insisted.

Well, of course it was anything but an amble. We clambered for hours up vast, perpendicular slopes, over clattering scree and lumpy tussocks, round towering citadels of rock, and emerged at length into a cold, bleak, lofty nether world so remote and forbidding that even the sheep were startled to see us. Beyond it lay even greater and remoter summits that had been quite invisible from the ribbon of black highway thousands of feet below. John and his chums toyed with my will to live in the cruellest possible way; seeing me falling behind, they would lounge around on boulders, smoking and chatting and resting, but the instant I caught up with them with a view to falling at their feet, they would bound up refreshed and, with a few encouraging words, set off anew with large, manly strides, so that I had to stumble after and never got a rest.

I gasped and ached and sputtered, and realized that I had never done anything remotely this unnatural before and vowed never to attempt such folly again.

And then, just as I was about to lie down and call for a stretcher, we crested a final rise and found ourselves abruptly, magically, on top of the earth, on a platform in the sky, amid an ocean of swelling summits. I had never seen anything half so beautiful before. 'Fcuk me' I said, in a moment of special eloquence and realized that I was hooked. Ever since then I had come back whenever they would have me, and never complained and even started tucking my trousers in my socks. I couldn't wait for the morrow.

The Appalachian Trail

Perhaps for some the following will summarise the feeling that we all have tackling a strenuous hill/mountain. It is a passage taken from a book written by Bill Bryson when at the age of forty-four he set off to hike through 2,200 miles of remote mountain wilderness filled with bears, moose, bobcats, rattlesnakes, poisonous plants, disease bearing ticks, salamanders and a range of other mammals, flora and fauna.

The Appalachian Trail is the longest continuous footpath in the world, stretching from Georgia to Maine through the Smoky Mountains, Shenandoah National Park, Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia (...in the shade of the local pines!!) and the Great North Woods of Maine:-

"The hardest part is coming to terms with the constant dispiriting discovery that there is always more hill. The thing about being on a hill, as opposed to standing back from it, is that you can almost never see exactly what's to come. Between the curtain of trees, the ever-receding contour of rising slope before you and your own plodding weariness, you gradually lose track of how far you have come.

Each time you haul yourself up to what you think must surely be the crest, you find that there is in fact more hill beyond, sloping at an angle that kept it from view before, and that beyond that slope there is another, and beyond that another and another, and beyond each of those more still, until it seems impossible that any hill could run on this long.

Eventually you reach a height where you can see the tops of the topmost tress, with nothing but clear sky beyond, and your faltering spirit stirs - nearly there now! - but this is a pitiless deception. The elusive summit continually retreats by whatever distance you press forward, so that each time the canopy parts enough to give a view you are dismayed to see that the topmost trees are as remote, as unattainable, as before. Still you stagger on. What else can you do?

When after ages and ages, you finally reach the tell-tale world of truly high ground, where the chilled air smells of pine sap and the vegetation is gnarled and tough and wind-bent, and push through to the summits open pinnacle, you are, alas, past caring. You soon realise - again in a remote, light-headed, curiously not-there way - that the view is sensational: a boundless vista of wooded mountains, unmarked by human hand, marching off in every direction. This really is heaven, it's splendid, no question."

Extract taken from a 'Walk in the Woods' by Bill Bryson