Mountain top launch for new book
and on Freeview 262 or Freely 565
A new title from Hebden Bridge based Gritstone Publishing will be launched on the summit of a Lake District mountain later this month.
The official release of Loughrigg: Tales of a Small Mountain will be at the top of the hill near Ambleside which is the focus of the new book.
Advertisement
Hide AdAdvertisement
Hide AdThe author, Eileen Jones, who lived in Hebden Bridge for 30 years before moving to the Lake District, is one of seven writers comprising the Gritstone publishing co-operative. They publish a range of titles from crime novels to guidebooks, all with an outdoors theme.


She decided on the novelty launch event after a number of celebrations were held on the fell top last year; they feature in the new book.
“For many visitors to the Lake District, the first mountain they climb is Loughrigg. For many regular visitors, their favourite mountain is Loughrigg. And for people who live around it, in Ambleside and Rydal and Grasmere and Elterwater, Loughrigg is their playground, their shortcut home, their respite from work, the backdrop to their lives,” she says.
“This is a love letter to Loughrigg, a book full of stories about the hill, the people who climb it, the people who live on it, the people who paint it, the children who play on it. So many people interviewed here speak of their favourite, the one fell they would happily climb over and over again, the place where they go for solitude and respite, for inspiration, for exercise, for sleep.”
Advertisement
Hide AdAdvertisement
Hide AdYes, the author is one of those who has slept out on the top of the mountain. Small in stature, but massive in bulk, Loughrigg (pronounced Luffrigg) is only just a mountain by English standards, only 1101ft (335m) high, and of the 214 peaks listed by Alfred Wainwright in his seven Pictorial Guides to the Lakeland Fells, Loughrigg scrapes in at number 211. It’s a sprawling two-mile long misshapen wedge of rough country rising between the valleys of the rivers Brathay and Rothay with a confusing number of subsidiary summits, but Wainwright loved it, “having a bulk out of all proportion to its modest altitude... no ascent is more repaying for the small labour involved in visiting its many cairns.”


Eileen’s two previous books for Gritstone were about parkrun: How parkrun changed our lives, and p is for parkrun: a journey from A to Z, about parkrun tourism. A former journalist with the Yorkshire Post, and then course leader for the Journalism degree at Huddersfield University, Eileen moved to Ambleside and set up Cumbria PR to tell the stories of some of the Lake District’s most iconic tourism and heritage organisations. She’s a member of the volunteer team at Fell Foot parkrun near Newby Bridge. Her sons Michael and David Burnip were members of the Calder Valley Youth Theatre; David is now a successful YouTube documentary film maker, with the channel Wandering Turnip.
The launch party at the summit of Loughrigg is on Friday June 28 at 2pm.
Loughrigg: Tales of a Small Mountain (Gritstone, £12.99)
ISBN 978-1-913625-12-2
Paperback, full colour cover, 200pp, £12.99
Publisher: Gritstone Publishing Co-operative, Birchcliffe Centre, Hebden Bridge HX7 8DG
Trade distribution: Cordee Ltd, 11 Jacknell Rd, Dodwells Bridge Industrial Estate, Hinckley, LE10 3BS, 01455 611185 and [email protected]