Practical-based Bling Sometimes, if we are lucky then at the top of the hill we have just ascended there will be a nice, carefully constructed summit cairn like this one, lovingly built, vandalised and now in the process of being rebuilt by kind ascenders of the Pike O’ Blisco in the Southern Lakes. At other times there will be an huge pile of rocks that will be more in the horizontal plane than in the vertical, ascenders of Ingleborough summit of late will know what I mean, and as for that messy pile of rocks atop Catbells…

At other times we get to feast our eyes upon one of the Ordnance Survey’s trig points. I prefer our type as opposed to some that I have seen in Majorca and others that can be seen via clicking the link to the Wikipedia spur in the above text. Incidentally, this must be purely by chance but most of the hills that I have covered thus far do not have “trig points” on their summit, Pen-y-ghent and Ingleborough being two exceptions that immediately spring to mind!

Some hills, fells or mountains go a step further by having a cairn (or two) and a trig point (or as in the case of Ward’s Stone a pair of trig points some distance apart!). Further to this on Ingleborough, Cross Fell, Helvellyn and others that I am not immediately able to recollect, kind people have sought to assemble wind shelters which have seating facing all directions – these are a blessing as at times even in July; the wind at summits such as Ingleborough can be bitterly cold, almost painfully so!

Ornamentally-based Bling Stepping things up a bit we have advanced hilltop ornaments (or bling as I like to refer to them) in the form of folleys and towers. Anyone who has ever been near to the south or east sides of Darwen, Lancashire could hardly have failed to have noticed the fine stone building known as “Jubilee Tower” at Darwen Hill, that has stood its ground in this one of the most windy of locations since 1898 other such monuments are scattered throughout the nation and the world itself.

Industrial-based Bling On a slightly bigger scale we have the “Radar Hills” such as Great Dun Fell, I don’t know of the locations of any more of these radar stations or weather stations for that matter but I am sure that they must be vitally important and therefore worth the visual expense of making the hill look really stupid – in this case like it has had a giant golf ball or a piece of hailstone land upon it!

Finally for the industrial part we have my personal favourite – Winter Hill on the outskirts of Bolton and Horwich, this isn’t even the biggest T.V. transmitter mast in the U.K. but hey, indulge me I grew up in its shadow and just look at that antenna array for fire, police, mobile phone networks, heck there are enough electromagnetic rays flying through the area in this locale to re-define magnetic north! I have never known it to be any diferent so I can’r raise any objection.

Arty Farty Bling The Angel of the North. I have only seen this spectacle on T.V., in newspapers and of course on web sites and can’t help but wonder ‘what is keeping it up?’. It is located on “Low Fell” in Gateshead next to the A1, I can’t actually get hold of a decent set of statistics for Low Fell which would determine if it is a genuine fell (with a summit of a type) or just a fell by name. The statue is 66 feet (20 metres) tall and its wings coming in at a staggering 178 feet (54 metres) across.

Religious Bling To the right is “Jesus Christ the redeemer” located at Corcovado mountain in the Tijuca Forest National Park, Brazil. This is not the largest Christ statue in the world, but I’m willing to bet that there is nothing to beat the combination of the statue’s height plus the height of the mountain (700 metres or 2,300 ft).

So that’s it. Our round-up of what I lovingly refer to as “hill-bling” is at an end. With the fear of being labelled as sacrilegious, I will state for the record that Winter Hill is still my favourite. However, I have just blown the dust of the top of the surface as far as the subject could go. How about you? Are there odd bits of “hill-bling” upon the peak(s) of your nearest fell / hill or mountain? If so then feel free to let me know via the e-mail form that I’ll soon be adding to the site.