downland,” says Shercliff, “but it’s cut into by several quite deep re-entrants, so if you ran across the grain of the land you could easily do five or 10-mile training runs that were virtually all up and down, all on rough ground.” In January 1982, CUFRC hosted its first fell race, a mere 100 miles away on Box Hill in Surrey. The home-counties location lacked rugged credibility in northern eyes, but, as London 2012’s Olympic cyclists will testify, it didn’t lack steepness, especially with a zig-zag route that squeezed 1800ft of ascent and descent from a 735ft hill. Runners came from as far afield as Cumbria and Yorkshire, and the race has remained a fixture of the fell running calendar (although Cambridge’s role in it has lapsed). A second CUFRC event, the Roaches, was set up in the Peak District a few months later. The 15-mile race attracted a field of 54, and, again, the race has thrived. CUFRC had 15 members by then, making it Britain’s 14th largest fell running club. Those who wore the light blue CUFRC vest began to be seen less as curiosities than as respected rivals to their northern counterparts. A few, such as Mark Rigby (Caius 1980), made their mark on the sport’s record books. There was even a brief attempt to set up an inter-university fell running championship. But keeping the momentum going was, aptly, an uphill struggle. Key players moved on, and in 1989 Hugh Shercliff (by then Research Fellow at Girton) bowed to the inevitable and allowed the remains of the fell running club to be subsumed into the hillwalking club. The two races were in due course taken over by local clubs; and those light blue vests, with CUFRC in cursive lettering and a little figure running up the slope of the ‘f’, became collectors’ items. Yet a University that draws students from all over the world is bound to attract, from time to time, a few students who combine academic gifts with the rare combination of talent and temperament that makes a fell runner. Current members of the Cambridge University Hare & Hounds cross-country running club who match that description include Will Bowers (Trinity 2009), a member of Ochil Hill Runners in Scotland whose accomplishments include a creditable showing in the Ben Nevis race, and Holly Page (Homerton 2013), who has already come second in one English Championship fell race this year – and who has been known to train by doing repetitions over the railway bridge. There’s also an annual club trip to the Easter Festival of Running on the Isle of Man, the attractions of which include the Peel Hill Race. Nor, it turns out, were the pioneers of
the 1980s the first Cambridge students to succumb to the lure of the fells. Several great Cambridge athletes of the early 1960s – Bruce Tulloh (Selwyn 1959), Herb Elliott (Jesus 1960) – are said to have dabbled with mountain-running, although not under University auspices; and Chris Brasher (St John’s 1947), later prominent in the sport, indulged his enthusiasms for cross-country running and mountain adventure while at the University, without ever quite meriting the definitive label of ‘Cambridge fell runner’. Go back further, however, and the record becomes clearer. In 1898, George Macaulay Trevelyan (Trinity 1893), a young fellow – and future Master – of Trinity, combined with two undergraduate friends, Geoffrey Winthrop Young (Trinity 1895) and Sidney McDougall (King’s 1895), to establish a fell running tradition that survives to this day. The Trevelyan Manhunt – like its summer offshoot, the Trinity Lake Hunt – is, essentially, a giant game of tag, which takes place over 10 square miles of wild Cumbrian mountains. Between 30 and 40 people assemble once a year in the heart of the Lake District and spend three days hunting one another. They are divided into hares – usually four per day – and hounds – everyone else. The hares get a head start to make themselves scarce in the mountains. The hounds then set off to ‘kill’ them. A kill is made by touching. It doesn’t sound dangerous until you think about it – at which point you realise that ‘affront to common sense’ is, in this case, putting it mildly. Think, for example, about the word ‘mountains’, and all that it implies: rocks, gullies, cliffs, extreme weather. Think, too, of the last time you played tag – the headlong sprints, the desperate lunges, the evasive twists and turns. Then mix the two together. The challenge lies in the fact that 10 mountainous square miles is an enormous area for a running game involving fewer than 40 people. The joy is that success depends partly on fitness, partly on fearlessness, partly on guile; but also, largely, on mastery of the landscape. When I tried it, last year, I thought I would be let down by my lack of speed. In fact, it was slow-mindedness that betrayed me. The best hunters know the hunt’s terrain intimately, and understand instantly the threats and opportunities offered by each square foot of ground. Tales from hunts gone by include incidents of hares climbing trees, hiding in haylofts, burrowing under boulders, swimming into tarns, leaping from great heights and, in several cases, escaping so
far up or down precarious rock-faces that hostilities had to be temporarily suspended. If that sounds foolhardy, well… in cold print, it is. Yet for most of its history, the hunt has been enjoyed by people of great intelligence. The bond with Cambridge was loosened when a separate Trinity Lake Hunt broke off in 1901. Nonetheless, a substantial proportion of hunters – who have included one chancellor of the exchequer, one home secretary, two secretaries of state for India, a lord chief justice and a governor of Hong Kong – have been Cambridge high fliers. Meanwhile, the Trinity hunt survives too, quietly convening for a week each summer. It’s a private tradition: the College has no formal role in it. Around 15 undergraduates are usually invited, with the other places taken by veterans who can’t bear to give the sport up. Why? It may have a lot to do with the age-old student propensity to take a detached attitude to risk. Geoffrey Winthrop Young wrote the first of the famous guidebooks for Cambridge nightclimbers: The Roof Climber’s Guide to Trinity (1900). Chris Brasher, half a century later, shared that enthusiasm. Yet the appeal of manhunting, and of fell running generally, goes deeper than mere thrillseeking. The need to immerse yourself in the landscape – in order to succeed and to avoid all manner of disasters – requires a shedding of civilised preoccupations that amounts almost to a shedding of self. For a few intense hours, fell runners must focus with demented intensity on every detail of the mountains until (as the Oxford philosopher and Trevelyan manhunter CEM Joad put it) they have been ‘impregnated by nature’. Mark Holland (Trinity 1994), Master of the Trinity Hunt, enthuses about exchanging “the pandemonium of modern life... for England’s most stunning and inspirational landscape”; Will Bowers, who has been on a Trinity hunt, talks about the joy of “getting out in wild places”; Holly Page finds “something freeing” about “getting to the top of a hill and hurtling down it”. But my favourite explanation was that quoted by Chris Brasher in 1972, after he had pressed some hardened fell runners to explain why they did it: “‘Oh come on, Chris, you know why.’” Fell running may never become a Full Blue sport at Cambridge; or even a popular one. But as long as there are students there who love to run, some will have dreams that take them beyond the drab horizons of the fens and into the cloud-topped hills.
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