The second is the question that grows until it is a shadow covering the whole book like one of those monstrous birds taking off against the sun in Eastern myth. It is the monosyllable: why? Where is the joy, the fun, in such activity? The heroes, the Alfs and Freds and Stans, are little help. Asking them is as pointless as asking Achilles or Cuchulain why they should want to kill, and glut the ravens, to quote the 7th-century Welsh epic Y Gododdin, when head-hunting was an earlier Cumbrian sport.

But, to give credit where it’s due, Askwith does attempt to answer it. Some urgency is added to his quest when, camped overnight with 500 other runners, he awakes at dawn to a latrine, a shallow trench in a field which all 500 have used, and almost faints from the stench.

So is it the views from the mountains? No. If runners stop, or even falter, to admire these, they fall behind. In their defence Askwith quotes Oscar Wilde, a name not usually associated with fell-running, that we look at Nature too much and live with her too little. But two moments in his own life provide some kind of an answer. Both have to do with achievement. One is when, having reached a summit late in the evening, he plunges downhill into a ‘sea of ancient Cumbrian twilight’, feels the ghostly presence of earlier runners, and is an outsider no more. The second is when, hobbling, he throws himself into a mountain stream for 15 whole minutes and feels he is immersed in England. Had a woman written that the reader would have found himself thinking of the young Hedy Lamarr in Ecstasy plunging naked into a woodland pool, instead of which...But there is good descriptive writing in both these passages, and, thankfully, the agonies for once are off-stage.

This is a very unusual book.

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