A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

Since 1953 when the tallest mountain was conquered by Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay the number of people reaching the summit has grown exponentially year on year, with well over 5000 people having made the ascent. Climbing to that height is not without risk, and with those numbers of people climbing there have of course been fatalities for a whole series of reasons, as well as the amount of junk left on the mountain has also grown too. Plus there is the cost of doing it, from somewhere you with have to find around £25k; most people will not ever reach this roof of our planet.

Conquering is a dreadful business, a blighted gene. I want nothing to do with it

Peter Owen Jones had another idea though, why not ascend the same vertical distance of 29,016 feet over a similar period of time that an ascent of Everest would take, but do it on some of the most beautiful hills that the UK has to offer. This has several advantages, you can get there quite quickly, you do not need to find large sums of money to do the challenge, you do not need oxygen and it you are still within reach of pubs and tea rooms for the required refreshment and recuperation.

Climbing up, walking to the summit, is a calling a summoning, for what can only be known, seen and heard on the edge of the land and the sky in the space between them.

In this book, Jones has collected together eighteen routes and climbs to achieve the total height that he wanted. These climbs begin in Cornwall and he heads up the west side of the country before reaching the summit on Scafell Pike in Cumbria. But there is much more to this book than just a series of walks. Jones is completing this partly as a personal pilgrimage but also as a way of taking a step away from the relentless stream of information from the internet, becoming an observer of people and things around his and taking time to reconnect with the natural world.

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