There is no obvious reason why the spirit of entrepreneurial enterprise should have an altitude ceiling, but news of a café having been established at almost 950 metres on the third-highest peak in England was always likely to prompt discussion.
Actually, “café” overstates it somewhat, as what brothers David and Owen Holmes from Bristol have been doing on the summit plateau of Helvellyn is to sell bacon rolls, biscuits and “a range of hot and cold drinks” from beneath a tarpaulin windbreak. It's not exactly the Striding Edge branch of Starbucks.
“It’s been quite busy,” David Holmes told Sky News. “We are just going to see whether it stays like this but we’re hoping it will get busier especially in August.” The pair are camping at the foot of the hill and – somewhat in the manner of the winter felltop assessors (although they take turns, week about) – plan to go up each day “to run their fledgling project” as the Sky report put it.
“As a temporary development it can carry on for 28 days without permission,” said a Lake District National Park Authority spokesman in the grough report of the story. “If the guys intended carrying on longer than that they would be advised to talk to our planners about any future planning permission requirements.”
Could such a thing happen in Scotland – while complying with planning and retail legalities and also in terms of fending off the likely outcry from the “wild land” brigade? The most legitimate comparison, in land-management terms, would be with national park hills north of the border – say were an ad hoc café to be established high on either Ben Macdui in the Cairngorms or on Ben Lomond in the area controlled by the Loch Lomond and the Trossachs authority. At the time of writing, it hasn’t been possible to obtain a comment from either administration – but David Gibson, chief officer of the Mountaineering Council of Scotland (MCofS), did offer his thoughts.
“Perhaps I can understand this happening in the Lake District,” said Gibson, “where over-worked mountain rescue teams have more than their fair share of folk to deal with who are ill-equipped and inexperienced and consequently rely on others to get them out of difficulties.
“If this happened on Ben Macdui we would expect and advise mountaineers to be totally self-reliant in the personal nutrition department as in other matters relating to their activities in the Scottish mountains. I’ve seen the pictures of the Helvellyn café and honestly can’t imagine any of our members preferring to rely on a couple of guys with a stove under a tarp, which might be there when you get to the summit, or might have been blown off the plateau into the Lairig Ghru in the meantime.”
Then there is the question of the quality or otherwise of food on offer at any such establishment. Although from the pictures there don’t appear to be any of the celebrated Cumberland sausages from Waberthwaite on offer on Helvellyn, bridies on Ben Macdui or locally sourced salmon on Ben Lomond might be the way to go.
”We’re not experts on nutrition,” said Gibson, “and we wouldn’t wish to comment either way on the nutritional value of bacon – butties of course being a favourite of many mountaineers, and bacon a main ingredient in so many of Maw Broon’s recipes – but we would continue to advise mountaineers to ‘take ample food and drink for each member of your group and always take reserve supplies; simple high energy foods are best as are hot drinks in cold wet weather’, which means pretty much most of the time.” Gibson recommends that walkers and climbers should consult the MCofS safety and skills guidelines for more advice on such matters.
Refreshments on or close to high UK summits are not new, of course. At present there is the café and "unique shopping experience" just a few strides from the summit of Snowdon, and from 1893 to 1904 there was not just refreshment but also accommodation available in the summit observatory on Ben Nevis. Even after this formally closed, there was occasional provision for another decade or so: “One of the rooms at the summit observatory was opened during the summer months for the refreshment of visitors,” wrote Ken Crocket and Simon Richardson in Ben Nevis – Britain’s Highest Mountain. “This continued until 1916, with a previous observer, James Millar, acting as keeper.”
A closer comparison, however, might be with the tearoom that used to stand close to the summit of Cadair Idris, not just because of the type of fare on offer, but also because it was – like the current Helvellyn enterprise – run by two brothers. (Precise details are hard to find, but it appears they were named David and Robert Pugh.)
“When I first climbed Cadair Idris (about 1954) the building was ruinous,” said Dewi Jones of Clwb Dringo said when asked about this in 1997. “But about ten years later I used to occasionally meet a man who was one of two brothers who ran the café before the war. They tried starting up again when demobbed from the RAF, but the tourists were not around and [they] soon gave up.
“He did tell me how to find the spring where they got water and in those days there was quite a bit of guttering in place making the water easy to collect. Today the spring is still flowing but the guttering is long gone.”
In terms of the low-tech approach of the Holmes brothers on Helvellyn, an even closer analogy might be with the wee girls who – for a couple of summers in recent memory – offered juice and biscuits for a small fee to walkers at the Invergeldie/Coishavachan car park in Glen Lednock, the start and finish point for the easiest way up Ben Chonzie. This catering arrangement seems to have been entirely unofficial, but it served to stave off a few hunger pangs for departing or returning walkers. It also gave the local kids something constructive to do in the school holidays and showed considerable inventiveness in terms of responding to a potential market.
The summit of Helvellyn can be as busy as Ben Nevis, Ben Lomond and Ben Chonzie combined on a fine summer Saturday, so the Holmes brothers are unlikely to run short of customers for as long as they are allowed to ply their Munro-height trade. Whether they end up on The Apprentice or Dragons' Den – or in the ecological bad books – remains to be seen, however.
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