🔚✨Lingmell: The Last Wainwright
- bootsandbanter
- Oct 22
- 7 min read
What ended on paper will live on in me
Wainwright #214 — Completion Day
Date: 18 October 2025
📍Route: Wasdale → Lingmell Nose → Lingmell → Wasdale Head Inn
📏 Distance: 10 km
⬆️ Ascent: 803 m
With: Maya, Dian & Skye
Weather: Violent winds turning slightly not so violent later
Mood: Grateful, stunned, and deeply aware this moment would not repeat
💚 Lingmell – the chosen one
I had chosen Wasdale for my finale long before the finale — back in 2023 when I first decided I was going to complete the Wainwrights.
I knew even then that this valley would be the place where it ended.
Lingmell felt right for that ending — its name might simply means “Heather Hill,” in Norse but Wainwright called it “a fell of distinction,” a quiet guardian beside Scafell Pike, where my journey began.
🏁 The Start — Walking Toward the End
I started this final climb with the three souls who matter most. We set off from the car park near the Wasdale Head Inn. I had butterflies in my stomach — hyped, excited, and so ready for this day to finally happen.
Lingmell was looming there in front of us, but nothing about it felt unfamiliar. I have scanned those slopes and that skyline so many times over the years — from other peaks, from Wasdale, from maps —approaching it felt strangely familiar, like walking towards something I already knew.
It was meant to feel like a celebration from the first step — the valley I love, the last peak, my people beside me.
Hoodie on for 10 minutes, then down to a t-shirt! Grey moody skies, but surprisingly calm at this stage. I kept thinking, how amazing… let it stay like this.
Spoiler: it didn’t.
I had checked multiple forecasts (over multiple days, multiple times a day🥴) and they all showed strong wind, but nothing outrageous — or so the apps claimed.
🌬️ Turning Up the Nose
The moment we turned onto the Nose, the mountain changed its mind. Wind picked up fast. I still resisted putting layers on until we reached the stile — then hoodie back on. It was cold with that wind. And after that stile? Horrendous. I cannot romanticise this ever.
Wind that came in sideways bursts, pushing our legs off their line. I kept looking back at Maya, watching her brace against it on a slope that already demanded respect without added violence. Skye’s fur was moving in wind pushed waves, Dian had his head down.
I felt that sharp internal sting of this was meant to be special — not a trial by elements 😣.
We could barely stand upright. The gusts were violent — the kind that knock you sideways without apology. I lost my balance twice. So did they. We stopped a few times because the wind was physically too strong to move through. He even lost his hat that was snatched by the gale force wind. I told him to leave it but no - there is another stubborn one – he dropped down on a very steep side and retrieved it!
There was no shelter, just exposure and misery. No jokes, no chatter — just survival mode in silence. I felt so guilty dragging them into it. This was not the finale I imagined… and yet, it was exactly the sort that chooses me.
I kept muttering “This is horrible! I cannot believe it. I am so sorry, you have to do this...”
👀 Views, and the First Crack in the Emotion
When the gradient finally eased, we layered up properly with jackets and kept climbing.
The gusts eased off — the wind was still super strong, but because the slope wasn’t vertical anymore it felt slightly better. Grassy, gentler underfoot, and suddenly survivable.
Only now I can notice - we had views. Grey, dramatic skies, but full visibility 360. I turned around and saw everything that built me: Great Gable, Yewbarrow, Kirk Fell, Wastwater, Mosedale… and Scafell on the right.
I dropped behind them for a moment and just looked. I could see versions of me on those peaks. I remember every single one and the weather. My chest got tight. I knew I was ten minutes from closing a chapter.
It hit differently there, not at the summit itself — a controlled, quiet surge of emotion, the kind that tightens the throat without taking you apart. Grief that it was ending, gratitude that this was my ending, and a flash of disbelief that I was actually here — all layered in one breath. One small tear escaped, not dramatic — just proof that the moment had landed 🥲.
🏔️ The Summit — Running Into the Finish Line
When the cairn finally came into view I didn’t walk the last stretch — I ran. I scrambled up onto the stones and threw my hands into the air like a kid who had just won something only she truly understood.
This is it — I did it.
No tears, no collapse, just a wide smile that felt bigger than my face. After years of chasing numbers alone, the finish landed with joy instead of breakdown — exactly the way I didn’t expect it to.
🎯 The Impossible Coincidence — Louise & Pierre
And then — fate hit.
I was on top of the cairn still fussing and I looked right and saw two figures just below the cairn, a metre away. They looked up at me at the same second and we all shouted:
“NO WAY!!!”
It was Louise and Pierre — the same people I met three weeks ago on mine and theirs 212 and 213… finishing their 214 on Lingmell at the exact same time as me.
What are the chances? You cannot stage this. We hugged, laughed, congratulated each other in disbelief — full shock energy.
We never arranged it, never even said a month or a date — and yet the mountain put us on the same rock at the same minute to finish the same journey. Not an hour before or after. It felt orchestrated. Like the fells themselves wanted witnesses for the ending.
The energy was unreal — not coincidence, not luck, but something cosmic and deliberate.
I didn’t want to break that moment by descending — I wanted to stay in that alignment for as long as I could.
🎖️The Medal and the Banner — Being Witnessed
Maya and Dian gave me a 214 medal 🏅 — “Wainwright 214 Club” — I also had a banner saying 214 Wainwrights Completed — Lake District 2025. Louise and Pierre loved it. I had carried a bottle of Wainwright Amber in my bag — freezing cold — and Dian opened it with the medal.
We stayed ages despite the wind. We chatted, admired the views, took pictures together.
At one point I even turned to Pierre and spoke out that Alfred Wainwright line:
“Every day that passes is a day less… the day will come when there is nothing left but memories.”
And there we were, standing in the exact moment that would become one of those memories. I don’t even know where that came from — it just came out, on my final fell, at the exact right time. 💚
🛑The Descent — Refusing to Leave the Ending
We split ways after about half an hour — they went one way, we took the main Scafell Pike path down.
No wind on that side at all — unreal difference.
I kept stopping, prolonging it, scanning Mickledore and Broadstand and telling Maya I want to do Lord’s Rake, West Wall Traverse and Deep Gill next summer. I didn’t want the day to end. That whole face looked so dramatic and intimidating in the grey light — and clearly my subconscious is already planning the next return for something equally dramatic.
On the way down I kept slowing without meaning to. I looked to the ridge, the water, the valley, to the place where the whole thing had just ended and rewritten itself. It wasn’t one feeling but all of them weaved together: grief that the chapter was closing, admire for the view, refusal to let it go, and the afterglow of what had just unfolded.
I knew I was walking away from the list forever, and I wanted to take every last second of it with me.
🍻The After — A Pint in the Valley With the Medal Still On
Back in the valley we went to the Wasdale Head pub for celebratory pints 🍻 — medal still on my chest, talking to people around us. Telling them the unbelievable story that just unfolded.
It was exactly the ending I wanted, even if the mountain made me earn it first.
The work was done, the ending was right, and I got the finish I always pictured.
🧭Reflection — The Kind of Ending You Don’t Get Twice
The universe delivered a finale so precise it felt intentional.
It validated the whole journey, like the mountains themselves stamped it with: yes, this mattered.
The symmetry of it — starting on Scafell Pike with my people and ending beside Scafell Pike with them, and with the exact same people I crossed paths with three weeks ago on the same final sequence of fells, at the exact same time — is too perfect to feel random.
It gave me not just a finish, but a story I will carry forever.
And I wasn’t alone — it was witnessed. That makes an ending feel real. It felt aligned, almost scripted by something bigger.
That is why this feels so special and so heavy - some days arrive because you grind for them, and some arrive because something larger seems to hand them to you.
This one was both.
I earned every mile that led to Lingmell — the weather, the solo days, the quiet climbs — but the way it ended felt given.
There are rare days in life that don’t just happen — they declare themselves.
This was one of mine, and I know I’ll speak of it for the rest of my life.
💚 For Now
I still can’t process it. One brutal, unforgettable, perfectly imperfect final day.
214 Wainwrights — complete.
👑 Stats Queen
⛰️ 214 Wainwrights completed over 64 hikes across 25 trips to the Lake District
🕊️ A quiet beginning — only one hike in 2020 — and steady growth each year
🔥 2025 was my dominant year — 69 new Wainwrights (76 with repeats), the most of all years
📈 More new peaks in 2024-2025 alone than in the entire period 2020–2023 combined
📏 Total distance walked: 1,050.4 km
⬆️ Total ascent: 61,895 m — that’s Everest × 7 from sea level
⏳ Five-year arc, but 84% finished in the final 3 years (2023–2025 when I did 180 out of 214)
🧍♀️ Solo percentage: 82% (176 peaks) — statistically this was a one-woman expedition. Not antisocial, just highly self-sufficient chaos.
"You were made to soar, to crash to earth, then to rise and soar again." AW
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