Coda: The Road Ahead

My roadtrips are getting further from home and require increasing amounts of time and planning, and I’m rapidly reaching the point where daytrips simply aren’t viable any more.  I’ll probably stop soon, whether I’m on a round number or not, but I’m not quite there yet.  There are still one or two parts of the country I’ve not yet visited.  There are a few opportunities for a couple of drive-by bags, which I’m sure I won’t be able to resist.  I have unfinished business in a few of the places that I’ve already been to.  There’s a handful of pillars I want to bag to extend runs of consecutrigs, or fill in gaps in sequences.  I want to re-attempt a few of my failures, which I rarely talk about, having since figured out why I failed to get them.  And there’s a couple of pillars I just want to visit because they’re in some way interesting.  I’d love to see my name make the top 100 most prolific trigpointers list, but that would need me to bag my 900th pillar and right now I don’t think I’ll make it as far as 800… though who knows?  

Above all, I still want an excuse to see more of southern England, because it’s not just about visiting the pillars.  Trigpointing has taught me where all these towns and quaint little villages are, that I know the names of but couldn’t have previously told you anything about (Where Places Are having been very noticeably absent from the curriculum when they taught me geography at school).  It’s shown me incredible sights across vast swathes of the English landscape, some of which (Malvern at sunrise) are spectacular beyond words.  It’s given me an opportunity to marvel at the beauty of the world, and time to reflect and be at one with myself in solitude and tranquillity.  Certainly I have a renewed appreciation for the miracle of creation, because sometimes it’s almost spiritual, being above it all, alone against the sky, with just butterflies and birdsong for company.  After the huffing and puffing to reach the top of a hill, as I catch my breath beside a pillar, very often I find peace. 


And that’s almost as satisfying as filling in a spreadsheet.

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