A man on Haystacks
There is a small tarn high on Haystacks above Buttermere, ringed by dark crags and quiet for most of the year. Alfred Wainwright walked there often. In the closing pages of the seventh Pictorial Guide, published in 1966, he wrote that this was the place he wanted his ashes scattered. Twenty-five years later, on a wet day in 1991, his widow carried them up the hill and did exactly that. Anyone who has stood at Innominate Tarn on a still evening understands why he chose it.
The seven Pictorial Guides, hand-lettered and hand-drawn between 1955 and 1966, are products of a particular post-war English temperament: unhurried, dryly funny, sceptical of fuss, and quietly besotted with a single corner of the world. They have also produced something the publishing houses of the 1950s did not anticipate: a peak-bagging culture. The 214 Wainwrights are now a list ticked off by tens of thousands of British walkers a year.
Wainwright himself was not really a peak-bagger. He was, much more precisely, a documenter. Each Pictorial Guide is an act of stubborn, patient observation - the angle of a path, the orientation of a cairn, the way the light falls on a particular crag in October. This is the part of him that has aged best, and the part that points, by a slightly unexpected route, to Jotunheimen.
What Wainwright actually loved
It is easy to mistake Wainwright for a sentimentalist. The books themselves are tougher than that. He could be impatient with bad walkers, openly contemptuous of careless guidebook writers, and unromantic about the weather. The Pictorial Guides are not a love letter to the Lake District; they are a survey, written by a man who happened to love what he was surveying.
What he loved, on the evidence of the books, was four things. He loved the ridges - the long, walkable lines that connect summit to summit, of which Striding Edge on Helvellyn is the canonical example. He loved the quiet upper valleys nobody bothered to visit. He loved old paths with an honest working history. And he loved being alone on a hill on a weekday morning in October.
None of these are particularly well served by the modern Lake District. The ridges are crowded by mid-morning on any half-decent Saturday. The quiet upper valleys are no longer quiet. The miners' tracks have been resurfaced, signed and stiled. The interesting question, for a British walker who reads Wainwright now, is where the next valid version of those four things actually exists.
Why Jotunheimen
The honest answer, on the evidence of a few summers of walking, is that the closest contemporary analogue to a 1960s Lake District is the Norwegian fjell - and within the fjell, the closest analogue to Wainwright's particular corner of it is Jotunheimen, the high mountain country that runs roughly between Lom in the north and Bygdin in the south.
The geography is the obvious starting point. Jotunheimen holds something in the order of 250 separate summits above 2,000 metres, packed into an area not much larger than the Lake District National Park itself. Galdhøpiggen at 2,469 metres is the high point of mainland northern Europe; Glittertind, a few kilometres to the east, is barely seventeen metres lower. The walking is on the same kind of bones - hard glaciated rock, long stable ridges, broad upper plateaus with weather that turns quickly. The scale is roughly the Lake District multiplied by a factor of two and a half. A walker who has done a long day on Helvellyn knows, in their legs, what a long day on Besseggen will feel like.
The cultural infrastructure is the more important match. The Norwegian Trekking Association (DNT) has run a network of mountain huts across the fjell since 1868 - now more than 550, ranging from staffed lodges to unmanned bothies with a key under a stone. The system was built by amateurs and retains a faintly Victorian flavour that any reader of Wainwright will recognise immediately. The huts are run on trust: you write your name in a book, you cook on a wood stove, you pay by leaving cash in a tin or transferring later. The system simply exists, and has existed for over 150 years, and works.
The fjell are walked by Norwegians on broadly the same terms that Lakeland was walked by Mancunians and Liverpudlians in 1955. The activity is called friluftsliv - literally free-air-life - and the point of the day, as far as a Norwegian walker is concerned, is the day. The cultural pressure to be seen on the right hill on the right Sunday, which has crept into Lakeland walking over the last twenty years, is essentially absent in Norway. This is the part that would have suited Wainwright.
The specific parallels
Anyone who knows the Lakeland fells well will find rough Norwegian equivalents waiting for them. The mappings are not exact, and the Norwegian versions are usually larger and quieter, but the shapes are recognisable.
- Skiddaw and the Northern Fells → the Galdhøpiggen massif
The Northern Fells around Skiddaw are open, rounded and on the grand scale by Lakeland standards. Galdhøpiggen and the surrounding Smørstabbtindane are the same kind of country, multiplied. The principal difference is the glacier crossing on the standard Galdhøpiggen route from Juvasshytta, which has no Lakeland equivalent and requires a guide.
- Striding Edge on Helvellyn → Besseggen
Besseggen is the most-walked ridge in Norway and the closest thing the country has to a famous walk. It runs for about eight kilometres above the twin lakes Gjende and Bessvatnet, with a knife-edge section where the ridge narrows to a few metres of broken rock. The comparison to Striding Edge is one a British walker makes within the first hour. The principal difference is the lake colour: Gjende is a vivid milky green from glacial silt, and from the top of the ridge it looks faintly unreal.
- Crinkle Crags and Glaramara → Surtningssue and Storronden
The quieter, scrambly summits behind Borrowdale and Langdale have their Norwegian counterparts in the second tier of the Jotunheim summits. Surtningssue at 2,368 metres is one of the higher Jotunheim summits and is essentially unknown to international walkers; Storronden, on the eastern edge of Rondane, is its near-equivalent on the next plateau north. Both are walked by ones and twos, not by groups.
- Old miners' tracks → DNT routes and old packhorse paths
Lakeland is criss-crossed with old working tracks. Norway has its own network of pre-tourist working paths: the kongeveger (king's roads), the old salt routes between coast and inland, and the seterveier that connected lowland farms with their summer dairy huts. Many of the modern DNT routes follow these older lines, which gives the walking the same sense of historical density that Wainwright valued in Lakeland.
What Wainwright would not have liked
It is worth being honest about this. Wainwright was not a universally generous writer, and several of his views would put him sharply at odds with the modern travel industry's version of Norway.
He would have disliked, immediately, the way the Norwegian fjord and fjell country is now packaged for the international market. The cruise-ship trade in particular - the day-trip pontoons at Geiranger, the bus parks at Flåm, the engineered viewpoints with their cafés - would have struck him as exactly the sort of fuss he spent his career writing against. He would also have been unimpressed by the larger guided groups. Wainwright walked alone or in twos; the modern coach-tour version of a high Norwegian summit, with twenty-eight people roped together on a glacier, is not the kind of day he would have signed up for.
He would, finally, have had no patience for the language. Most of the words used to sell international travel in 2026 would have produced a single eyebrow and a sentence in plain English to the effect that nobody who actually walked the hills talked like that. There is no reason to use the language of an in-flight magazine to describe a country that does not deserve it.
How to walk Jotunheimen in the Wainwright way
The practical question is how to do this in a way Wainwright himself would have recognised. The short answer is: slowly, in a small party, with a paper map and a working compass, sleeping in DNT huts, and without a tour guide unless the route demands one.
Take the train and bus rather than the cruise. The Jotunheim Express runs from Oslo to Gjendesheim, Bygdin, Spiterstulen and Juvasshytta in around five hours. A single carriage on the morning train out of Oslo will get you closer to the spirit of the country than a week on a coach tour. Buy the Statens kartverk 1:50,000 sheet for the central Jotunheim area before you leave home. The Norwegian mapping is good - the Ordnance Survey would recognise it as a sibling system - and a printed map weighs less than the anxiety of a flat phone battery on a high ridge in cloud.
Stay in the DNT huts. Book the two or three you need ahead through ut.no, but resist the temptation to plan the whole week in advance. A great deal of the pleasure of a Jotunheim trip is the freedom to read the weather in the morning and walk a different route from the one you intended. Keep the party small. Two is ideal. Above six, the Norwegian fjell starts to behave like a Lake District summit on a bank holiday, and the entire point is lost.
Walk midweek if at all possible. Saturday on the standard Galdhøpiggen route is busier than the day deserves; Tuesday is quiet by an order of magnitude. And take a long lunch on the summit. Wainwright was a great believer in the long sit-down in the right place, with a thermos and a sandwich and an hour to look at what was in front of you. Norwegian midsummer light, usable for eighteen hours a day in July at the latitude of Jotunheimen, makes this thoroughly possible. The afternoon is not wasted because you sat for an hour at the top.
If a guided week makes more sense
All of the above assumes a self-guided traveller with the time and the map-reading to plan a Jotunheim week directly through the DNT, which is genuinely the best way to do it. For walkers who want the same country with the planning lifted off them, two trip-shapes into Jotunheimen work well: a hut-to-hut walking week across the central plateau, with Galdhøpiggen as one of the high days, and a focused Galdhøpiggen four-night guided walking holiday, built around the guided summit day with a quieter day on Glittertind to round it off. Both run with Norwegian guides certified through the Tindevegledere or UIAGM scheme. Both keep the groups small.
If a different kind of Norwegian week appeals, write to us with what you have in mind. For readers working through the Norwegian peak list with a more bagging-oriented eye, the companion piece For Munro-baggers: Galdhøpiggen, Glittertind and the Norwegian tops covers the catalogue in more practical detail.
And back to Haystacks
Wainwright closed the seventh Pictorial Guide with a short note on Haystacks - the modest fell, well below the height of its neighbours, that he chose as the place his ashes would go. He liked it, he said, because the views were better than the height suggested, because the upper ground had a half-dozen quiet tarns, and because a person could sit on it for a long afternoon without being disturbed.
The Norwegian fjell is a higher and harder country than Lakeland. But the same sort of place exists in Jotunheimen, in numbers. The unfashionable second-tier summit with the better-than-expected view, the shoulder above a hut where you can sit alone for an afternoon, the small lake under a north-facing crag with no one within five kilometres - these are the ordinary geography of the Norwegian high country, not the exception. A British walker raised on Wainwright already knows what to look for.
He would have walked it. Anyone who reads him with attention can see exactly which ridges he would have written up first.
