Helvellyn, in its own contour lines.

What the print holds

Helvellyn on paper

Helvellyn has two faces and the print shows both. Its western side, above Thirlmere, is a long and even slope, drawn as a sheet of nearly parallel lines running down to the water, and the water itself fills the western edge of the frame as a long blank shape — no contour crosses a lake, because a lake is flat. The eastern side is where the mountain was carved: glaciers bit deep hollows into it, and the ridges they left between them are Striding Edge and Swirral Edge.

Red Tarn is a small flat shape just east of the summit, held in a horseshoe of crowded lines. Swirral Edge leaves the summit plateau to the north-east and climbs to the neat, tight rings of Catstye Cam; Striding Edge runs out east along the southern side of the tarn, and on the sheet it is a narrow tongue of lines pinched almost to nothing, which is exactly how it feels to cross.

North and south of the top the main ridge runs on as a spine down the middle of the sheet: towards Lower Man and Raise in one direction, and to Nethermost Pike and Dollywaggon Pike in the other. East of that spine each cove is a bowl of close lines; west of it the slope never breaks.

At this frame the print draws a contour every twenty metres and makes every fifth one heavier, so a hundred metres lie between one heavy line and the next. The summit plateau is broad enough that its top ring is a wide, calm shape — the flat ground people picnic on after the scramble.