If 2013 was the year the Tumps made it into the public eye for the first time, then 2014 saw no slow-down in the rate at which enthusiasm for them grew - at least from some quarters. He may have something to say about this elsewhere, however even Alan Dawson has been enjoying bagging (and surveying) the ones close to home. That is surely where the list's strengths lie - with 16,807 hills surely far too high a target for any one lifetime, interest on the Tump forum mailing list has coalesced around local and county completions. The biggest county to fall by the end of 2014 was North Yorkshire with its 206 Tumps, though Rob Woodall had pressed ahead with nearly 50 county completions.
The wider community has shown interest as well. Lose Hill in Derbyshire, the flagship Tump in terms of being one of the most famous hills to be a Tump and not be in any other list, reached 101 logs, and several low-level Tumps close to places like Manchester and Glasgow had 15-20 logs each. Remarkably, with only a couple of exceptions, every single Tump in northern England has been logged by somebody or other.
As far as data is concerned, the review continues apace, with Jim Bloomer and George Gradwell in particular painstakingly checking literally thousands of hills. My own contributions have largely been restricted to scanning the maps for new Tumps, of which there have been quite a few - 117 to be exact - in 2014 (this includes hills over 500m), spotted by many pairs of eyes. Complementing these nicely are the 123 deletions, which have mostly come from looking at large-scale mapping of those hills previously given with 30-35m drop.
Some of the additions to the list have come under peculiar circumstances. In May I discovered an entire area of section 21B that I had completely missed out of the original survey; the rate of lowland Tump bagging in Scotland is clearly low enough that no-one spotted ten hills missing from the map for over a year.
Sgorr Racaineach, a 404m Tump in Glen Lednock (photo: Alan Dawson)
Courtesy of research by David Purchase, in September the Tumps expanded to cover the Channel Islands, adding eight new hills in addition to the three Humps and a Subhump, though visits so far have been limited. Following discussions on the forum, some bings (grassed-over spoil heaps) in central Scotland were added soon afterwards.
There have also been plenty of relocations and name changes - and some of the relocations have been replacements in the sense that new entries have been added for the new tops, though where there have only been a few logs, we still just relocate by changing the grid reference and hoping the previous loggers will catch on that their logs may not be valid.
As this is Marhofn not Tumphofn, let me mention that the Tumps change registers are at hills-database.co.uk/tumps_revision_history.html. Changes are announced on the What's New section of the hill-bagging.co.uk site and, when I remember, on the Tump forum mailing list. Now then, why not complete the Tumps in your home county?
