A search of the RHB mailing list archives a while back unearthed this fascinating comment...
'A proper list of British 100m drop hills is the obvious next step for those of who have run out of Marilyns within a 3 hour drive. Why don't TACIT Press, Prof Yeaman and Clem Clements pool resources and publish a decent list of British Yeamans?? Shouldn't be too big a job!'
- Chris Upson, 16 Oct 2002
I'm going to assume that last sentence was sarcastic Chris, as the amount of effort involved was quite large, but anyway, such a list (of hills in Britain with over 100m relative height) is now available for your collective enjoyment as an e-book.
The idea has been around a long time. To give the history briefly, Dr E.J. Yeaman published his 'Handbook of the Scottish Hills' in 1989 and Clem Clements followed suit for the southern provinces four years later. His effort was never published, but thanks to the power of the Internet, the two lists were made available to web-savvy baggers from 2002. Steady progress was made over the next few years, with Rob Woodall, Alan Dawson, Bernie Hughes and many others (a massive thank you to everyone involved, by the way) conspiring to produce full drop information for every such hill by 2007. The Word document I managed to pull together was perhaps more pleasant to look at than rows in a spreadsheet, but a lot of the data was out of date. Making revisions without any database was a nightmare, there was a mass of extra information about the hills begging to be added, and I was having ideas about a new region system.
I guess some people are wondering about the name. The hills themselves were mostly courtesy of Yeaman and Clements, but a unified name seemed a good idea. Also, a lot of people have contributed to the lists since then, and the acronym Humps (HUndred Metre Prominences) was simply too good to ignore. 'Prominence', by the way, is just a synonym for drop.
The present e-book of Humps would never have come to fruition had it not been for the dedication of the Database of British Hills team and the hard work of David Stone. Being able to rely on up-to-date, collated data free of charge was a godsend. So was having someone who was able and willing to transform a load of data and badly-written text into a professional-looking document, as well as suggesting numerous improvements; what you see on the e-page is at least as much David's work as mine.
As well as the main list, the e-book contains a few appendices. These contain information that walkers might find useful, such as relocated summits and twin peaks, as well as more personal favourites such as hills on the main watershed. There is also a comprehensive list of sub-Humps available for the first time, some information about hill names, and a full index.
The book's ordering of the hills might be its most confusing aspect for those used to SMC and RHB regions. My natural inclination has always been to go with the lie of the land and the way the hills naturally relate to one another, something that the order in the book attempts to represent by arranging the hills into a vast 'family tree' based on the parent-child relationship. The hills end up being sorted into natural groups, with a hill's neighbours generally listed closer to it. This also necessitated the construction of a new set of 'topo regions' which follow the natural divisions and groupings of the hills. This is all explained in more detail in the book, which includes a crash course in parenting (parent peaks that is).
By now you may be wondering how to get your hands on a copy, so you'll be pleased to learn that the e-book is free. You can download it from Simon Edwardes' hill-bagging.co.uk or from Jonathan de Ferranti's viewfinderpanoramas.co.uk. Paper copies will probably be available from the print-on-demand site lulu.com, which does charge, but it's just for the distribution.
Finally, exactly why do we need another list of hills? The question is mostly answered by Chris's quote above. Many baggers have run out of new hills to do that involve less than a three-hour drive (or less than an epic trip to St Kilda). It is my hope that the Humps will keep people going, offer them fresh challenges and show them hidden corners and new areas of the country. This applies particularly for those living in the midlands and south; the Peak District has five Marilyns but 27 Humps. However, the list is massive - did I mention that there are 2987 of them, including the terror-inducing Old Man of Hoy, which poses an even more comprehensive barrier to completion than the St Kilda stacks. Maybe the Humps are better used as an incentive to exploration rather than a final distant goal. Whatever your motives, I hope you manage to get some enjoyment out of it; if this whole list gives somebody one great day out that they wouldn't otherwise have had, I'll reckon the whole caboodle to have been worth it.
'then it's just a matter of time before someone rounds off that icky 150m to a rounder 100m... and you at the head table of the Hall of Fame can traverse the country all over again ...'
- Alun-Peter Fisher, 13 Jun 2001
An Grianan, an 864m Hump in Glen Lyon (photo: Alan Dawson)
The Humps Hall of Fame isn't quite on the same scale as the Marilyn Hall of Fame, partly because I don't have quite the same connections as Alan and partly because it's a lot harder to get into; the idea was to make it so that even someone who'd nearly completed the Marilyns still had a fair amount of work to do before they could call themselves a 'champion Humper'. The tactic seems to have worked, as the band is a little small at the moment. To encourage people to take up the challenge, here are the most recent 2000+ totals I know about:
| Rob Woodall | 2607 | Ken Whyte | 2365 |
| Ann Bowker | 2484 | James Gordon | 2267 |
| Rowland Bowker | 2426 | Colin Crawford | 2147 |
Anyone who thinks they might have broken the 2000 barrier, or is measuring their progress towards it, is very welcome to let me know, via markjackson2@btinternet.com. Please contact me on anything Hump-related.
