The Road goes ever on and on; Down from the door where it began;
Now far ahead the Road has gone; And I must follow, if I can;
Pursuing it with eager feet; Until it joins some larger way;
Where many paths and errands met; And whither then? I cannot say.

[JRR Tolkien, Lord of the Rings]

Wednesday 2 September 2015

Marilyn Tally

In a recent comment Conrad said:

“What about some Marilyn stats? You keep sneaking them in, but the running total seems to be on the Top Secret List.”

Despite appearances, it’s not that I’m trying to keep my count secret, it’s more that it’s not a number that I keep in my head, probably because at the moment it’s such a small proportion of the grand total.

However, I’ve spent some time reconciling my spreadsheet with my Hill Lists App, so can now declare the current count.

It was the second week of November 2014 when Conrad’s gentle persuasion won through and I decided that the Marilyns looked an interesting list of hills to target (albeit with no intention of ever completing the whole list; aside from anything else, my aversion to boats rules out quite a few). At that point I happened to have already visited the summit of 56 of them.

Since then I have ticked off another 143, bringing the grand total to 199198*. I shall hopefully bring it to a nice round 200 before my first Marilyning year is over.

image

 

(*I’ve just seen that Swyre Head was demoted from the Marilyn list in June this year (we were there in January) thus reducing my actual count to 198. Fortunately, it wasn’t an outlier requiring a special journey, and was a very pleasant morning stroll, giving us good views along the coast.)