There were no new entrants to the Simm Hall of Fame in 2015 but there were two significant developments. Iain Thow became the second person to climb all the Simms, finishing them in June on Cut Hill on Dartmoor, which he climbed on his way from Glen Coe to Arran. The other big news was the renaming of Sims to Simms, and hence Simhof to Simmhof. I decided that 'Sim' was far too common and ambiguous a term to be a satisfactory name for a set of hills. The other problem was that the abbreviation for six-hundred metre summits only works in the plural form. At first I thought that the extra M could stand for 'mountain', but it is stretching a definition to consider all 2526 of them as mountains. Summits yes, hills yes, but hardly all mountains. After some rumination and research, I concluded that the second M should stand for 'monteto', which is the word for hill in Esperanto. A Simm is therefore a six-hundred metre monteto. As Esperanto is an international language, the second M can stand equally well for mountain, mount, mam, meall, mullach, moel, mynydd etc, according to location and preference. It can also stand for 'mons' when the time comes to list the six-hundred metre summits on Mars and the moon - 'montetos' sounds preferable to 'monses'.
There were five new inhabitants of the Simm Corridor in 2015, with Alan Whatley the highest new entrant. Gavin Theobald and Neil Sandilands both pushed on at a steady pace and are now within sight of the Hall. Gavin (shown below) does not use a car so would be the first person to enter the Simmhof by using feet, tent and public transport. Living in Fort William and doing some running evidently helps but it's still impressive. It's hard enough with a car.
| Ken Whyte | 2526 |
| Iain Thow | 2526 |
| Andy Hyams | 2521 |
| Colin Crawford | 2357 |
| Rob Woodall | 2164 |
| Alan Dawson | 2126 |
| Colin Donnelly | 2109 |
| Gavin Theobald | 1953 |
| Neil Sandilands | 1950 |
| Bert Barnett | 1810 |
| Michael Earnshaw | 1791 |
| Alan Castle | 1773 |
| Jim Bloomer | 1697 |
| Graham Illing | 1688 |
| Alan Whatley | 1635 |
| Richard Webb | 1618 |
| Richard Speirs | 1592 |
| Gary Jones | 1572 |
| Alan Brook | 1557 |
| Eddie Dealtry | 1542 |
| Iain Brown | 1538 |
| John Ward | 1532 |
| Andrew Tibbetts | 1507 |
| Martin Richardson | 1504 |
All Simm baggers are encouraged to enter their hill logs into the hill-bagging.co.uk website, so that totals can be automatically kept up to date and easily retrieved at the end of the year.
