My Second Mountain (Video)

I mentioned Grange Fell in The Illusion of Loneliness blog back in May – and this video was taken from one of its three summits… the highest, called Brund Fell, which rises over the Borrowdale Valley, with views north towards Derwentwater, Keswick and Bassenthwaite in the English Lake District.

I climbed this mountain by accident…

Last Autumn, I was living and working at a hotel in Rossthwaite, a small village in Borrowdale, and since there was no Vodafone signal in the valley, my fancy iPhone had become little more than an alarm clock and MP3 player.

I heard tell that there was a great signal up in the hills – though I used to walk up about 800-900ft each day or two, to my meditation point (from where I took the background photograph that’s on both this blog and my Twitter page), and I didn’t get any bars on the phone there…

… so, one day, I decided to head up to the highest part of the hill I could find, and ended up at this spectacular position.

I didn’t realise it had a name, at the time, or that it was so high. At 1363ft, I was almost 90ft closer to space than when I climbed The Steeple, in Lochgoilhead.

And when I got up to the top, my phone started chiming like a bell falling down an escalator, with all the messages and alerts finally able to get through. I even made a few phone calls from up there, not that the people I phoned likely heard more than the sound of the gusting wind.

Here are a few photos, too, which you can click on to see them full size: