Chapter 4: Weaknesses and Geeknesses

Lesson Seven:  There’s little point being a trigpointer if you don’t have a head for heights. 

I had admired S2533 Cley Hill from afar, passing it some distance away when my wife and I paid a visit to Longleat Safari Park a couple of years earlier.  It looked like it would offer a particularly fabulous view, and the revelation that it had a trig pillar on top of it was about as surprising as Christmas landing on December 25^th.  I planned a roadtrip that led directly to it (the smaller the car park, the earlier in the morning you want to get there), and then mapped out a rambling journey back home that took in ten more pillars.  May 31^st was a beautiful morning, bright and clear.  Arriving in a half-empty car park, I proceeded to follow the footpath to the hill and then up the side.  It was very steep – moreso than anything I’d previously encountered.  And I… well, let’s just say I would make a very poor mountaineer, and I’ve no plans to go trigpointing in the Scottish Highlands any time soon.  I froze halfway up from a sudden attack of utter terror.  I made the mistake of looking down.  I’d come quite a way already, but there was quite a way to go, and it only got steeper.  And yet further up in front of me was a family with small children, just casually hiking up to the top without a care in the world.  Rarely have I felt so stupid or ridiculous, but I barely had the courage to move, let alone go on.  I edged myself sideways, where I found a path leading around the side of the hill.  If I can approach at an angle somehow, it won’t feel so steep.  I followed the path around, taking uphill turns through gorsey clumps wherever I could.  The path petered out and disappeared on the hillside.  I backtracked and headed further round the side of the hill.  There, the path came to a dead end at a particularly sheer drop.  I backtracked again and tried another route.  And another.  I found a chalky path that led into what might once have been a small quarry on the side of the hill, all grassed over now.  The steep sides of the alarmingly undulating topography were extremely beautiful to look at, but suddenly seemingly impossible to escape from…  no wait, there’s a ridge at the far end that looks like it has a chalky path running over it.  It’s going the wrong way round the hill, but it’s not that steep of itself - just don’t look down.  And so it went on.  I must have taken over an hour to find a route that didn’t trigger a paralysing vertigo that I never previously knew I had.  And with Cley Hill being a tourist attraction, I felt exposed and completely humiliated.  I both love and hate this hill with a passion.  “Try, try, try again…”  Round the far end, I could see the pillar taunting me from the summit, so far up, but at an angle I simply could not ascend.  I went back on myself again, found another ridge, and another dip, and then a chalky path winding along the edge to… is that the top?  Yes, yes, yes!  Made it!  By now, the plateau at the top was swarming with early morning walkers, all looking fresh as daisies.  I was an unkempt sweaty wreck.  I made a beeline for the pillar and took my selfies, imagining the looks I must have been getting, and ignoring them all, because sod them, I’d overcome a personal challenge and a large part of me was absolutely elated.  I daresay there are far more difficult or vertiginous hills out there (I’ll leave it a few years before I look at Stiperstones or Petit Tor), but this was the first one I needed to beat, and it gave me the right mindset to tackle the likes of Chase End, High Peak, and Colmers Hill later on.  If I can make it up Cley Hill, I’d tell myself, I can make it up this one, too.  Eyes on the ground, one foot in front of the other, quick as you like, don’t stop to think.  Because fuck my weaknesses.  It’s time I stopped letting them define me.

 

The return journey was sunny and productive, with nine of the ten remaining pillars on my list successfully bagged.  S2523 Upton Cow Down is inaccurately named.  It should be called Upton Sheep Up.  The sheep in question were guarding the pillar at the edge of their field, but moved aside for me.  On my return to the footpath beside the field, I encountered an elderly chap wearing just a pair of shorts, who approached me to determine my purpose there.  When we had both established that neither of us was the farmer, he confided in me that he enjoyed coming up to the top of the hill to sunbathe in the nude!  S1531 Westbury Down is on top of one of Wiltshire’s white horses, though you probably wouldn’t know that if you weren’t looking for it.  A toposcope sits on the edge of the hill, looking out over the chalky equine figure carved in the hillside, and pointing the way to the towns and cities nearby.  The trigpoint, however, is a few hundred metres away, behind a row of trees, and next to a barn.  It’s away from the car park and picnic area, and enjoys remarkable privacy for a pillar on a popular hill.  In summer months, it’s also concealed beneath swathes of trailing ivy.  Westbury Down’s best kept secret.  S2477 Stoke Hill Farm is a roadside pillar leaning at a significant angle.  An easy enough bag, until you try to leave, whereupon you’ll discover a contender for the worst kept road in Britain.  And S2404 Aldbourne Gorse is a slightly damaged pillar that I’d previously attempted to bag en route to Martinsell.  Having revisited Google Maps beforehand, this time I ignored the signpost and took the correct fork up to the trig in the field edge, before heading down into the village for an ice cream and a couple of selfies in front of the church that featured so prominently in a 1971 Doctor Who story (whose first episode also featured altered signposts).

 

Where shall we go next?  After Cley Hill I wanted somewhere a little flatter, so where better than The New Forest?  There are lots of easy roadside pillars there that take mere moments to bag: S2632 Pound Bottom (stop sniggering), S2706 Hatchet Moor, S2707 Hilltop (possibly the least accurately named pillar of all), S2712 Sway, S2715 Yew Tree Heath, and S2718 Bramshaw were mere moments along a sunny June roadtrip that saw me add a whopping seventeen new rows to my spreadsheet!  I felt certain that seventeen pillars in one day would prove an unbeatable total, although (give or take the occasional horse or donkey wandering across the road) none of them were particularly memorable – much as I enjoyed this trip, the only story I have to tell begins and ends with that total.  A potential run of seven consecutive pillars from S2712 through S2718 was spoiled by the absence of S2717, which I could not locate on the map no matter how hard I tried.  I later consulted the OS Benchmarks website, which swiftly revealed the reason: it’s up north, some ten miles the wrong side of Crewe.  Come on, OS, play fair here!

 

July brought a trip to the picture postcard villages around Winchester, with S2751 Fair Oak proving to be a very pampered highlight.  This pillar sits on a small mound in the corner of the park in a very tidy and well-maintained village.  A large metal toposcope has been laid out on the mound, and the pillar forms the centrepiece.  There’s a free car park close by, and even a hand-made wooden sign which tells you how many footsteps it takes to reach the trig point.  What more could I ask for?  S2730 Old Winchester Hill was this trip’s best known stop, being on the far end of a lengthy promontory with spectacular views that attract walkers in high numbers.  By contrast, S2635 Green Hill gets very few visitors indeed, being well concealed in the depths of a very large roadside hedge.  There’s always one.

 

Come September, I found myself with a lot of unused holiday days (thank you Covid), so I booked off every Tuesday to the end of the year and got myself into a routine: plan ‘em the first week and bag ‘em the second; repeat until Christmas.  This worked exceptionally well as it still left my weekends free for the non-trig-related bits of my life, and I repeated the trick on Fridays in the last quarter of 2022.  I returned to Dorking to complete the list from my first trigspedition the previous July, before turning my attention to the fabulous South Downs.  I must have had my spreadsheet head on when I compiled my longlist for this trigspedition, because I noticed fairly quickly that a lot of the flush bracket numbers were very close together.  I wondered how many consecutively numbered pillars I could bag on a single trip.  I’d found a run of five in the New Forest, but that was atypical – it’s very rare indeed that I’ll get more than three in a row on any given day.  They would all need to be in the same region; they would all need to be on pillars rather than walls; they would all need to still exist; and they would all need to be accessible.  Well, my longlist had about eight or nine on it in the S1660s and S1670s which almost formed a complete run of eleven.  I wonder where the missing ones are?  A quick look at the Benchmarking website filled in the gaps… and they were all on pillars and within reach.  I added them to the list.  However, it’s all very well knowing there were eleven consecutrigs in a small radius – are they all still standing?  And if so, are there any barriers to my reaching them?  I visited the Trigpointing UK pages for each of them, to turn my longlist into a shortlist.  Hilltop beside a bridleway; roadside; woodland beside the Serpent Trail; field edge…  so far, so good…  ah.  Reservoir.  Reservoirs are generally fenced off and inaccessible.  No wait, there’s a log here says it’s only got a little barbed wire fence, and there’s a collapsed bit I could step over – we’re still on…  and so it continued.  Every single one of them was achievable (and it’d be a pity not to see the view from S1501 Butser whilst I’m passing), so I worked out a route and set off.

 

S1671 Salt Hill Reservoir gave me a confrontation.  First stop of the day, I cross the gate into the field behind the reservoir, and within seconds there’s a chap approaching me in a small tractor.  Hiya.  Am I all right to be here?  Long as you clear up any mess you make.  We get a few people up here to see the view, picnicking and dropping litter.  I reassured him I would leave only footprints, and that I was actually only here to see the trig.  He then relaxed and told me all about the reservoir, including (unprompted) where the collapsed bit of fence was if I wanted to get in and take a closer look!  I think it’s the only time a local has ever assisted me in a trespass!

 

The parking meter at Butser was broken, so I got away with a freebie there.  Winning.  S1673 West Harting Down was hidden away in a wood that, just like Martinsell, proved very brambly and prickly to enter.  Unlike Martinsell, though, it was not very dense, and I had eyes on the pillar very quickly.  I’ve found a few bizarre things on top of pillars – painted pebbles, roses, dog biscuits, and even a pair of novelty slippers – but this was the most gruesome: an animal skull rested in the middle of the brass spider.  I took photos and posted them to Facebook in the hope I knew someone who could tell me what the poor unfortunate creature used to be.  A sheep, or a deer, or a fox, maybe?  No consensus was ever reached.  It had vanished by the time the next Trigpointing UK contributor came along, and I can’t help but wonder why anyone would take it.

 

I took a wrong turn somewhere on the way to S1669 Rogate, which cost me about half an hour.  I was more than usually keen to complete all the stops on this trigspedition (my ONMLKJIHGFECD wouldn’t have been able to stand a gap in this sequence), so I went back to my roadmap to re-orient myself.  Missed the left turn at Albuquerque.  OK, back we go…  and I eventually found the right location on the other side of the village, and parked up.  The Rogate pillar is also hidden away in a wood, and the logs on the Trigpointing site suggest GPS is pretty much essential if you want to find it, due to the lack of landmarks showing the way.  I am a Luddite - no GPS for me, just a pen and paper and some forward planning.  Keep going up, however slightly, I told myself.  No other advice was needed.  I may well be the only person who’s had more trouble driving to the wood than walking to the trig.

 

S1676 Woolbeding was hidden among the ferns at the summit of a long and ill-maintained single track road.  S1675 Blackdown marks the West Sussex county top, and involved tramping up a wide and muddy woodland track with steep embankments that exposed the roots of the trees that towered above them.  I felt very small.  S1667 Oakshott was in a recently cleared patch of woodland atop a steep hill, also accessible from a lengthy single-track road, and offered a fine view.  And at the other end of the sequence, S1677 Weavers Down took me down the narrowest road yet.  The aerial view on Google Maps had shown a woodland clearing where it was possible to park, at the end of an un-photographed track.

 

Lesson Eight:  If the Google Maps camera car hasn’t been down it, there’s a very good reason why a Ford Focus shouldn’t attempt it.

 

The track there was in such a bad state that I pulled into a small passing place halfway along, for fear of doing my car damage.  I will tell anyone who’ll listen that my little runabout will turn on a pin, but I lost count of the number of points in the turn I had to make in order to get back to the road.  The pillar itself is on the wrong side of some scary (but not prohibitive) signposts advising that the military like to blow chunks out of this bit of land.  Fortunately for me and a couple of squirrels, they were otherwise occupied whilst I was there, and like Rogate before it, the pedestrian section of this bag presented fewer issues than the four-wheeled section.

 

S1668 Warren Corner took about two minutes, as it was a very small number of metres from the road.  S1670 Holtham was on a field edge slightly shy of a bright and colourful verge of wild flowers.  S1672 Four Marks sat somewhat diagonally in a fallow field, a lot less overlooked by the houses across the road than Google Maps had me believe.  Ten out of eleven, but the sun’s starting to set – can I complete the sequence before it does?  There’s supposed to be a footpath running across the field in which S1674 Candover sits, from a steep embankment one side to a roadside corner at the other.  Approaching from the corner (the logs on the website were discouraging of the other direction), the way into the field was clear, but the actual route of the path was not.  As the dry ground had been freshly turned over, I was keen to tread on as little of it as possible, so I assumed the path went from the field edge to the pillar at the shortest possible distance.  And with the sun low in the sky, I sat at the base of the trig, took my photos, and grinned from ear to ear at the accomplishment of a very unlikely feat of concrete-based numerical geekery!  As I type, I have no other runs of more than nine consecutive pillars on my spreadsheet at all, never mind in a single day.  It is ridiculous how chuffed I was (and still am) to have completed this most pointless but satisfying roadtrip.

 

And then for an encore I drove past S1686 Broxhead Common on the way home, and took some blurry-but-still-discernable photos of that one too, in the dying remnants of the sunlight.  Come on!