The Hill You Drove Past: In Defence of the Summits Nobody Photographs
There's a hill near my house. Nothing special — 430 metres, one broken wall, a trig point with a lichen problem. It takes about fifty minutes from the layby. In six years of living here, I climbed it twice.
In the same six years, I drove past it forty-odd times on my way to somewhere better. Snowdonia. The Lakes. The Scottish line-up of the moment. And every time, I told myself the same thing: that little bump will still be there.
It will be. That's the problem. It'll always be there, patiently waiting, while the big names hoover up every fair-weather Saturday you've got.
The Tyranny of the Horizon
Route selection is where most hill days are quietly won or lost, and hardly anyone talks about it. We spend fortunes on boots and shells and then hand our weekends over to whatever's most famous within a two-hour drive.
It's not stupidity — it's psychology. The famous hill carries a story. You've seen the photos, read the route descriptions, watched the YouTube vloggers panting up it. Choosing it feels like joining something. Choosing the unnamed ridge next door feels like settling.
But settle for what, exactly? Nobody's queueing at the layby. Nobody's tripod blocking the path. Nobody's expecting you to summit by a certain time to make the car park worthwhile.
What the Overlooked Hill Actually Offers
I finally went back to my local bump on a grey Tuesday in February, mostly out of guilt. Here's what I'd been driving past:
- A proper view, uninterrupted. From the famous tops you look at the landscape. From the overlooked ones, you look across it — including at the famous hills themselves, which look genuinely magnificent from a quiet ridge two miles away.
- A route you can actually feel. On the busy fells, you spend half the day managing other people. On the forgotten ones, you notice the change in the grass, the old quarry track, the kestrel. The hill gets your full attention because nothing else is competing for it.
- Honest effort. A 400-metre hill climbed briskly is a proper workout. Nobody hands out medals for suffering up a Corbett in a gale, but your legs don't know the difference between a famous ascent and an anonymous one.
There's something else, too, and it's harder to pin down. When you climb a hill nobody talks about, the whole experience belongs to you. No expectations, no checklist, no pressure to have the canonical day out. You're free to turn round early, to wander, to sit on the trig point eating a pasty for twenty minutes because there's genuinely nothing else to do.
The Deliberate Second Choice
Here's my proposal, and I'd encourage you to try it once this season: plan a hill day where the famous option is the one you rule out.
Pick your area — the Lakes, Snowdonia, the Cairngorms, wherever you usually go — and then deliberately choose the hill beside the star. Not the second-highest, not the list-ticker, but the one that appears in the background of other people's summit photos.
A few ways to find them:
- Open the OS map and look left. Most classic routes have a quieter neighbour across the valley with almost identical views.
- Check the photo credits. If a hill never appears on Instagram, that's not a red flag — it's an invitation.
- Ask a local, not the internet. Shopkeepers and campsite owners always know the 'we just go up there' hill, and they're usually delighted to send someone.
You'll know you've found the right one when the guidebook gives it three lines and the parking is free.
The Case for the Unremarkable
I'm not suggesting you abandon the great hills — the classics are classics for a reason, and the big days are what most of us live for. But there's a version of this hobby that turns every outing into a transaction: bag, tick, move on. The overlooked hill is the antidote, because you can't really bag it. There's nothing to complete. You're just going up a hill because going up hills is the whole point.
That little 430-metre bump near my house? I've climbed it nine times now. I know where the stonechats nest and where the wall corner gives shelter from the south-westerly. I've watched three sunsets and one frankly apocalyptic hailstorm from that trig point.
It was there all along, fifty minutes from the layby, waiting for me to stop driving past. Yours is too. It's the hill you skip every weekend on the way to somewhere better — and one of these days, it's worth finding out that it is somewhere better.
