Scafell Pike, in its own contour lines.

What the print holds

Scafell Pike on paper

Scafell Pike is not a single cone but the high point of a rough, sprawling massif, and on the print it reads that way. At the default frame of seven kilometres the summit sits among a cluster of small closed rings — the knobbly, bouldery top that anyone who has crossed it will recognise — with ridges leaving it in several directions and deep ground between them.

South-west, across the narrow col of Mickledore, the rings of Scafell rise almost as high again, and the two summits read as a pair joined at the neck. North-east of the top, Broad Crag, Ill Crag and Great End carry the ridge towards Esk Hause, and to the north Lingmell and then Great Gable stand above Wasdale and Sty Head, Gable's rings as neat and round as a thumbprint. Bowfell fills the eastern side of the sheet.

To the south the ground drops into upper Eskdale, where the lines spread out across the flat, wet floor of Great Moss before the river gathers them into a valley. The western edge of the frame reaches the head of Wasdale. Between all of these the contours never settle into a single pattern for long, which is what the Scafell massif is like underfoot: broken, crossed with gullies and crags, never smooth.

At this frame the print draws a contour every twenty metres and makes every fifth one heavier, so each heavy line is a hundred metres. The highest of them on the sheet is the nine-hundred-metre line; the summit stops twenty-two metres short of where a tenth would be.