Whether each of the seven books is a ’masterpiece‘ is a matter for debate and personal opinion. There is little doubt that the series, taken as a whole, merits that label, but everyone will have their favourite volume, whether for use on the hill or for browsing by the fireside of a dark winter evening. That my own favourite is Book Four, The Southern Fells, is not solely because family connections mean I often spend time in that most perfect of fell-villages, Coniston. For me, Books One and Two carry an air of Wainwright finding his feet, of a style still being evolved. See how relatively scant the detail is, both in terms of the drawing and the minutiae of route-description, for the Striding Edge approach to Helvellyn in Book One, compared with the welter of detail for similar routes on other fells–Sharp Edge on Blencathra in Book Five, for example, or the almost step-by-step accounts of Jack‘s Rake and Lord‘s Rake in Books Three and Four respectively.

By Book Three, The Central Fells, Wainwright had found his style, had settled in. But Book Three suffers from curious topography, in that the Lakeland fells, like a certain brand of peppermint sweet, have a hole in the middle. Hence, of the twenty-seven Book Three fells, only High Raise reaches the 2500ft mark, and then only just. The next ’lowest‘ book is The Far Eastern Fells, high-point High Street, 2718ft. This is a substantial difference, and it shows. Even though The Central Fells includes the Langdale Pikes and that most celebrated of little fells, Loughrigg, there is a sense of it being the runt of the litter. This is not just because of its page-count–260 pages including endpapers compared with 300 pages or more for each of the other six books–but because it includes more than the standard share of fells which even those with a fair amount of Lakeland knowledge would struggle to place. High Tove, anyone?

The four books that follow, however, are chunky, solid affairs, with Wainwright‘s now-established style applied to the grand arc of western and northern ridges. The Western Fells feels a particularly strong choice for a finishing book, and Wainwright does a fine job of blending its major summits (Gable, Pillar, High Stile) with the smaller treats (Mellbreak, Yewbarrow and his beloved Haystacks). Such is the success of these later books that a case could have been made for Wainwright to revisit the start of the series. This never happened, and it would be wrong to see the first two books as failures–they‘re still far more accomplished than pretty much any non-Wainwrightean guidebook. But I‘m surely not alone in wishing that Helvellyn, in particular, could have been portrayed using the almost forensic level of detail of which Wainwright had shown himself capable by Book Seven.