The Wrong Hill

The black arrow is where we parked; the red arrow is the wrong hill; the blue arrow is the right hill.

“How could you possibly have confused two different hills, three miles apart and in opposite directions?” asked Mick when I realised that I was on the verge of leading Mick up the wrong hill in Shropshire last week.

At a glance it was a truly ridiculous mistake to have so nearly made, but I do know how it came about:

I had planned the outing using OS mapping on my laptop (nice big screen, giving a good view of not just the objective, but also the surrounding area), combined with Google Maps for aerial photos and StreetView, which had allowed me to identify a Colin-sized parking area in Kempton. What I recalled from the planning was:

1) we were to park in Kempton;

2) we were to follow the Shropshire Way for much of the walk; and

3) the hill-top in question was marked on the map as a fort and surrounded by woodland.

On the day I was using OS maps on my phone, which gives a rather restricted view. Having found Kempton, I duly followed the Shropshire Way until I found a Fort marked. The hill I found looked about the right distance away and of a suitable height with a suitable amount of prominence, so no alarm bells rang and it didn’t occur to me that I should check to see if there was another (very similar looking!) hill in the opposite direction.

I’m sure that the wrong hill would have been a perfectly good walk (and it would have put a tick on the HuMP list – not that I’m collecting HuMPs), but from a point of view of embarrassing incidents, I’m very glad I had the last minute thought to mark the exact position of the summit on my map before we set out. I did that to avoid a repeat of Monday’s missed-summit-by-60-paces incident; in the event it saved me from missing my intended summit by 3 miles!