From Dan McKeown…

Having injured my knee prior to this year’s Yorkshire Three Peaks race, I had set myself a recovery target of a ‘Calendar Three Peaks’: to do Pen-y-ghent on Y3P race day, retire from the race at Ribblehead, and pick up the other two peaks in other races during the year.

I accomplished the first part – my first-ever DNF – then sat on my hands and didn’t bother entering the Whernside or Ingleborough races that Settle Harriers organise, so it rather looked like I’d missed my opportunity. However, my C3P was granted a reprieve when a new event appeared in the running calendar: the Ingleton Three Counties, which would enable me to visit both remaining peaks in one fell swoop (dum-tish).

The downside: it’s a 19-mile 5,500ft race (plus one of the eponymous counties is Lancashire).

I sounded out a couple of other Harriers to see if we could get the required three runners to make up a scoring team, and managed to get Dave Robson and Paul Carman involved. What a result! On arrival in Ingleton, it turned out that Settle Harriers had brought half their club, and a lot of them looked disturbingly young and fit, but at least our presence meant they would actually have to beat someone to win the team prize instead of just getting it by default so hurray for that, I suppose.

It’s probably worth explaining the course at this point: departing from the Ingleton scout hall, runners head northwest to climb Gragareth on the Lancashire / Yorkshire border, then follow the watershed north to the imaginatively named Green Hill, which takes us into Cumbria. Descending to the east, runners then climb the west flank of Whernside (technically still Cumbria until you reach the wall at the summit), then go barrelling joyously down the east side into Yorkshire. It’s then all the way up to Ingleborough via Park Fell, and back down to Ingleton for tea and cakes.

As it turned out, both the Whernside and Ingleborough ascents were considerably more forgiving than on the Y3P race route, and the madcap descent of Whernside made an interesting reversal of the Y3P – plenty of Harriers will have grim memories of trudging up that way on the shortest (but steepest) line to the summit.

As Settle Harriers had shown up mob handed, inter-club rivalry looked a bit of a stretch, but we could still enjoy a good spot of intra-club rivalry between the three of us. As we came over the top of Whernside, you could have thrown a foil emergency blanket over the entire Harriers team, so close together were we. Dave took off on the descent of Whernside and opened up a sizable gap while I tried to hang onto Paul. It had all changed by the time we reached Ingleborough summit and I was first over the top, but then had Paul snapping at my heels all the way down the descent, with Dave feeling a bit gassed after his Whernside heroics.

While Dave hasn’t raced much lately, Paul’s done about 60 races in the last fortnight, so I was able to drag myself clear in the last couple of miles on the track down to Ingleton to complete my C3P in style – 11th out of a field of about 50 and probably behind all of Settle’s team scorers (although results aren’t published, at the time of writing).

We then went and sat in the scout hall and looked at the enormous pile of cakes on the table, and decided we couldn’t eat any of them. Paul commented that it was the sign of a good race when everyone’s just sitting around dead-eyed afterwards and can’t talk or eat.

As for the whole Whernside / Cumbria malarkey, the Whernside trig point is just the wrong side of the wall that marks the county boundary between North Yorkshire and Cumbria. So while Yorkshire’s highest point *is* on Whernside, it’s not quite at Whernside summit. Or not the trig point, at any rate. If you can cope with this revelation, good for you. I’m not sure I can.

Territorial controversies aside, the inaugural Ingleton Three Counties race, while gruelling, was great fun to be part of, and I hope it will establish itself as a fixture in the fell running calendar for years to come.

Results

11 Dan McKeown 3:48:12

12 Paul Carman 3:49:05

15 Dave Robson 4:00:29