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 Fellwanderer, the short book he published in 1966 just after the seventh Pictorial Guide, he wrote that this was the place he wanted his ashes scattered. Twenty-five years later, in March 1991, his widow Betty took them up the hill with friends 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, hand-drawn and published 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 that walkers tick off fell by fell, and the Wainwright Society keeps a register of those who finish.
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
Our 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 all 26 of Norway’s highest summits, packed into an area about half as large again as the Lake District National Park. Galdhøpiggen at 2,469 metres is the high point of mainland northern Europe; Glittertind, about 13 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 heights are roughly the Lake District’s multiplied by 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 around 600, ranging from staffed lodges to unstaffed huts opened with the standard DNT key. The system was built by amateurs and retains a faintly Victorian flavour that any reader of Wainwright will recognise immediately. The unstaffed huts are run on trust: you write your name in the visitors' book, cook on the gas rings, light the wood stove for warmth, and pay for your night in the DNT app. 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 Smørstabbtindane across Leirdalen to the south-west 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. The heights and the order to take them in are laid out in For Munro-baggers: Galdhøpiggen, Glittertind and the Norwegian tops.
- Striding Edge on Helvellyn → Besseggen
Besseggen is one of the most popular walks in Norway and the closest thing the country has to a famous walk. The classic crossing from Memurubu to Gjendesheim is about 14 kilometres, high above the twin lakes Gjende and Bessvatnet, with a narrow, steep section of broken rock and drops on both sides. 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, the south-easternmost of the high Rondane tops, is its near-equivalent on the next plateau north, though as Rondane’s most-climbed summit it is the busier of the two.
- 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. Several of today’s walking routes follow these older lines (Kongevegen over Filefjell, the 1790s road between Valdres and Lærdal, is one), which gives the walking the same sense of historical density that Wainwright valued in Lakeland.
What Wainwright would not have liked
This part needs saying plainly. 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 method 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. Through the summer the Valdresekspressen coach goes from Oslo by way of Valdres and Bygdin to Gjendesheim, and a direct bus to Lom connects with the local buses up to Spiterstulen and Juvasshytta. 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 Kartverket’s Norge 1:50,000 sheet for the central Jotunheim area before you leave home; map shops print it on demand. 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, and away from the Norwegian summer holiday (fellesferien), when the guided Galdhøpiggen crossings can be fully booked. 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. We do not currently sell a week in Jotunheimen itself.
If you would rather have the planning lifted off you, send us your dates and we will tell you plainly whether one of our weeks does; the Hardanger walking week is the fjord-country alternative, and the short Rondane hut walk the gentler way in. For readers working through the Norwegian peak list with a more bagging-oriented eye, the companion piece above covers the catalogue in more practical detail.
And back to Haystacks
Wainwright closed the seventh Pictorial Guide by leaving Haystacks out of his best half-dozen fells only for want of height - the modest fell, well below its neighbours, that he chose as the place his ashes would go. He still called its summit area the best fell-top of all: rocky tops, hidden corners and a string of small tarns, Innominate among them.
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.
