Eighty Years of the Trig Point

Monday was the 80th anniversary of the Ordnance Survey starting to use trig points to retriangulate Great Britain and the story was covered at some length by the BBC.

There were once about 6,500 trig pillars, built by the early surveyors at OS. The pillar was devised by Brigadier Martin Hotine to provide a solid base for the theodolites used by the survey teams and to improve the accuracy of the readings obtained. Although the OS no longer uses the trig pillars, maintaining them is still its responsibility and about 6,000 remain.

Here are a selection of those scattered around the Lake District.

Skiddaw

Skiddaw has a typical cast concrete trig point but actually these are relatively rare on tops and it seems to have been more common hereabouts for the surveyors to make trig points out of local rock held together with mortar like these:

Loughrigg Fell

Lank Rigg

Gowbarrow Fell

Although that's not to say there aren't other cast trig points around. For example here's one being more typically busy than the photos above suggest. These guys had been trig point "planking" - sadly we didn't get a photo on that occasion but if you've not seen people doing this before, and it does seem to be a thing, then go here for some photos (no, us neither).

High Street (Racecourse Hill)

But overall we think trig points are still important, not to the Ordnance Survey now but to us walkers as they provide a proper destination to a walk.

It's very common to be sitting having your lunch close to a trig point and to see a walker puff their way to the top and the first thing they do it go to the trig point and "tag" it. They have arrived. They have climbed the fell.

And that's what it's all about isn't it?

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