WESTMORLAND: An autumn walk round the Langdale watershed took me first on to the shapely summit of Pike o’Blisco where heather and mosses so pleasantly fleck the pink-grey rocks, and a fine, upstanding cairn mounts guard over the valley. Some years ago vandals, having nothing better to do, knocked the top two or three feet off this well-proportioned pile and I noticed the cairn is still decapitated, and hardly the thing of beauty it used to be. During recent years other vandals – or perhaps the same ones – have dealt similarly with several of the best-built summit cairns on our mountain tops including the splendid specimens on Dale Head and Lingmell, and, for all I know, other childish demolitions may be planned.

There is nothing especially sacred about these summit cairns and some mountains, including Helvellyn, seem to manage well enough with no more than a heap of stones or nothing at all, but some of us have known them all our lives and they have long been part of the scenery. The best of them, fashioned by devoted hands, can be graceful and attractive and even the worst can serve their purpose as something against which to rest your back or to give a bit of shelter once you have reached the top. And all of them, craftsmen–built obelisks of rickety piles, have our affection. If these young vandals must work off their excess energy how much better employed would they be if, instead of demolishing inoffensive summit cairns, they turned their hands to the hundreds of ridiculously sited heaps that nowadays litter most of the popular mountain paths. About one tenth of these untidy heaps – provided they were in the right place – would be more than ample.