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WALKING T


erry Abraham is fi nally having a rest. It’s a scorching May day in Keswick’s Crow Park, and he has a pint of Cumberland in hand. The sun shines on a breeze-ruffl ed Derwentwater, a view of clear green fells stretches all the way down Borrowdale to Great End, and occasionally someone shoots past overhead on a giant zip line, releasing a piercing scream.


We’re at Keswick Mountain Festival, where Terry’s


new fi lm, ‘Life of a Mountain: Scafell Pike’, is headline entertainment, his name sitting alongside the likes of Doug Scott, Ranulph Fiennes and Alan Hinkes. It’s the second hit in quick succession for Terry, whose 2013 fi lm, ‘The Cairngorms in Winter with Chris Townsend’, beat a roster of daredevil climbing fi lms to become the most popular download of all time on outdoor fi lm website Steep Edge. Terry’s rapid rise in the world of ‘adventure fi lmmaking’ is nothing short of remarkable, not least of all because, by his own admission, he doesn’t make ‘adventure’ fi lms. “This white-knuckle adventure porn, it doesn’t appeal to me in the slightest,” he says, as an accordion-playing pastiche of a Tyrolean folk band starts playing in the adjacent beer tent. “They are impressive. But for me it’s not what the outdoors is about.


“THIS WHITE-KNUCKLE ADVENTURE PORN, IT DOESN’T APPEAL TO ME IN THE SLIGHTEST.”


“A lot of those fi lms are all about egos and the ‘do it in a day or die’ mentality. The outdoors is just a playground, a backdrop. Well, these landscapes we have here” – he gestures at the breathtaking ring of fells around Derwentwater – “are not just a playground, they’re places to learn about and admire.” Like ‘The Cairngorms in Winter’, ‘Scafell Pike’ is almost


determinedly anti-adrenaline. Alan Hinkes, summiteer of the world’s fourteen 8,000 metre-plus mountains, makes an appearance, comparing the Lakes to the Alps and explaining the mountaineering pedigree of Wasdale. At one point, as a sort of public warning, he attempts a climb of the lethal, slippery Broad Stand, thinks better of it, makes a few jokes, and comes back down. Also featured is the legendary (for once not a light use of the term) fell-runner Joss Naylor, a man whose titanic feats of endurance – he once ran over 72 Lakeland mountains in under 24 hours, and continues to regularly run in the mountains at the age of 78 – are hardly mentioned by the softly-spoken, unassuming farmer who appears in the fi lm, herding sheep through Wasdale fi elds, reclining in an armchair and talking affectionately of Scafell Pike as a “big pile o’ stones”. These are the real men behind the deeds, presented without any PR gloss, and not attempting some Herculean deed but simply being themselves. It is quietly compelling stuff. But while the characters in the fi lm might not be attempting arduous physical tasks, the man fi lming them certainly was. As with his previous projects, Terry worked entirely alone on ‘Scafell Pike’, camping wild in the fells through all seasons and rising at the crack of dawn daily to capture the sunrises, sunsets, cloud inversions, sudden shafts of light, night skies, rolling clouds, brooding crags, tumbling waterfalls and movielike timelapse sequences that make up


32 | 70TH ANNIVERSARY YEAR | FOR BRITISH CLIMBING AND WALKING SINCE 1944


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