This is a great documentary about Alfred Wainwright. Apart from filling me with a sense of awe at his prodigious technical output and stoic mountain fortitude, it was also reassuring to know he was a merciless curmudgeon, eschewing crowds of school kids on the peaks, and bemoaning encroaching commercialization. It inspired me to get yet more of the major Wainwrights under my belt in future. This documentary is the opening episode in the Wainwright Walks Coast to Coast series, with soggy biscuit Julia Bradbury, notable as in this episode there are thankfully relatively few soft porn shots of her huffing & puffing uphill for the camera. One of my teacher colleagues relayed a story about his friend who was up walking on the West Pennine Moors near Blackburn years ago. On the tops he came across a myopic old man smoking a pipe, and they agreed to walk down together. It was only after the old man had gone on his way that my colleague's friend realised he had been in the modest company of Alfred Wainwright. To delight in anonymity; to feel alive only when wrapped in the solitary cool breezes of the mountain; Wainwright is someone from whom we all can learn.
North Utsire
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