Joss Naylor's funeral felt like 'the start of a race, not the end'
The hills had been swarming with runners all morning. As noon approached, we converged, streaming over the passes and down the various rocky paths that lead down to Wast Water.
The peaks themselves were grey, with an ominous cover of storm-cloud darkness. But the closer we got to Wasdale Head, the more brightly our colours shone. With a little local knowledge you could have worked out where many of us came from. Blue-vested Cumberland Fell Runners had run from Ennerdale, green-vested Black Combe Fellrunners from Eskdale, purple-vest Borrowdale runners from Honister. I’d run with a Keswick group (yellow-and-green) from Seathwaite, but for the final descent we were sharing a path with Ambleside (navy with green stripe), whose eight-mile route had started at Langdale.
But it wasn’t just the clubs from the immediate vicinity. I saw vests from Eden Valley, Dallam, Kendal, Helm Hill, and, beyond the Lake District, Howgill Harriers, Bowland, Dark Peak, Settle, Pudsey & Bramley, Bingley, Bolton, Preston, Leeds, Durham, south Wales, the Scottish Borders. Cars had been left at various strategic points – Wasdale’s narrow lanes could never have coped – and we had spent the humid morning running across the fells, determined not to miss the funeral.
'How many are you expecting?' Radio Cumbria had asked the organisers. 'About 100? Or nearer ten?' When I got down to Down-in-the-Dale bridge there seemed to be six or seven hundred, but there was half-an-hour to go, and runners were still hurrying down from the fells. Some put the final total at 1,000.
Richard Askwith
This isn’t how funerals usually begin. But there was nothing ordinary about the man we were mourning. Joss Naylor, the toughest British athlete in living memory, had, unthinkably, breathed his last on 28 June. His passing, at the age of 88, felt shocking as well as sad: as if one of the fells that had overlooked his life had crumbled overnight into dust. It felt important to do something: to acknowledge what he had given us. So here we were, on an overcast Friday when most of us should have been at work, to see him to his final rest – and to honour him as no runner has been honoured before.
To say that Joss Naylor was a famous fell-runner is like saying that Muhammad Ali was a well-known boxer or Emil Zátopek a successful Olympian. It’s true, but it misses the story that matters. Naylor was a colossus, who not only took his sport to breathtaking new heights but (like Ali and Zátopek) did so with a charisma and greatness of heart that brightened the lives of all who came into contact with him.
He never won an Olympic medal, or earned a penny from his sporting achievements, or did anything much in the public gaze. His greatness was realised in wild, remote places. Yet he ranks among the absolute all-time elite of British sport.
Even by contemporary standards, Joss’s feats of mountain endurance in the 1970s and 1980s beggar belief. To name just a handful: he won the notorious Ennerdale Horseshoe (23 miles, eight peaks, 2,290m of treacherous ascent and descent) nine times in a row. He completed the fiendishly challenging Lake District Mountain Trial 42 times (plus 10 more on the Short course) and won it an unprecedented 10 times. He also repeatedly won the Wasdale, the Duddon Valley, the Welsh 1,000m Peaks and the Manx Mountain Marathon – all events whose length and severity deters lesser runners from attempting them at all.
But races weren’t even Joss’s strongest point. What made him a legend was his appetite and aptitude for implausibly difficult solo peak-bagging challenges. He first displayed this in 1971, by becoming only the sixth person (in 39 years) to complete the famous Bob Graham Round: a 66-mile, 42-peak circuit, to be completed in 24 hours, that had once been considered as unattainable as the four-minute mile. But Joss didn’t just complete it: he repeatedly crammed more peaks (and miles) into the 24-hour period. In 1972 he reached 63 summits; in 1975, 72 – a circuit of over 100 miles, with 37,000ft of ascent and descent, on treacherous terrain, hammered out, on that occasion, in a blistering heatwave.
Other long-distance challenges he completed in his prime included the Pennine Way (268 miles in just over three days, in 1974), the Coast-to-Coast (190 miles from St Bees to Robin Hood’s Bay in 41 hours, in 1976), Hadrian’s Wall (84 miles in just under 11 hours, in 1980), a 105-mile route linking all 27 of the Lake District’s 'lakes, meres and waters' (in 19 hours and 15 minutes, in 1983), and, most sensationally of all, a circuit of well over 350 miles taking in all 214 peaks in Alfred Wainwright’s seven-volume Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells, which took him seven days, one hour and 25 minutes (starting and finishing in Keswick) in 1986.
These are just numbers: times, dates and distances that have already been listed in countless obituaries (and that have, in any case, been mostly superseded by sophisticated modern record-breakers). What filled Joss’s admirers with an awe bordering on hero-worship was the texture of his achievements: the fact that he ran on fells that were still (in those days) a largely pathless wilderness, seemingly unbothered by sharp-edged rocks and shifting scree, with minimal equipment, in all weathers, keeping going further than anyone had dared to imagine before, with nothing to guide him but a compass and his lifelong intimacy with the Cumbrian landscape.
His skeletal frame (5ft 11in and 9 stone) looked frail, yet when running he seemed indestructible. He attributed his toughness to his relentlessly active outdoor lifestyle (he was a hill-farmer) and his easy movement over ankle-threatening rock-scapes to his experience of dry-stone walling. ('You’ve got to be able to read the stones,' he said. 'You’ve got to know which are loose and which you can count on.')
There may or may not have been more to it than that, but, in any case, his capacity for endurance seemed limitless. And no matter what hardships he suffered, he never seemed to lose his wry humour or his interest in people and nature – or his quiet determination to keep pushing himself harder and further.
Yet he never made a fuss about it. This wasn’t the kind of super-toughness that flexes its muscles in public (or brands itself with labels such as 'the Hardest Geezer'). It was a profound, private, inner strength: a toughness from an earlier age that Joss seemed to see as a kind of duty, although most of us saw it as heroic.
Nor can his running be captured in the language of elite sport as we know it today, with its sponsors and grants and hi-tech kit and data-driven training and nutrition programmes. Joss set his records in moments snatched from the relentless demands of hill-farming. His training consisted mainly of long days out on the fells, tending his sheep or making and mending dry-stone walls. He had no special technical secrets: just no-frills resilience, pig-headed will-power and an unwavering love of the fells.
There was something heroically simple – almost primitive – about Joss’s greatness. He planned many of his adventures by the light of paraffin lamps – electricity didn’t reach Wasdale Head until 1976. He fuelled himself with rock-cakes, apple pie and Guinness, or, occasionally, salted blackcurrant juice. Sometimes he would jeopardise a record attempt (such as that 1986 Wainwright round) with a diversion to rescue a lamb in distress. And when the wild environment turned hostile, as it often does on Cumbrian fell-tops, he had no hi-tech kit to protect him: just a waterproof top, some battered shoes – and a miraculous ability not to be broken by the terrors of the mountains.
That was the strangest thing. Every fell-runner starts off brave, but the fells have a habit of bursting our bubble. It doesn’t take much, for most of us: one unfortunate footfall, one tougher-than-expected ascent, one navigational error – and our resolve starts to leak away. Exhaustion, bruising, cold, wet, disorientation, dehydration, sore joints, aching tendons, battered, empty muscles: all these occupational hazards feed off one another and multiply, until the prospect of yet more miles of running on hazardous surfaces and painful gradients fills us with a dread that’s hard to distinguish from fear. Yet Joss, who ran in precisely the same inhospitable environment as the rest of us, seemed somehow untouched by its discomforts. Or rather: he suffered the same pains – and much more besides, since he pushed himself so much harder – yet somehow he was able, as he put it, to 'shrug it off'.
When he finished his Coast-to-Coast run in 1976, all ten of his toe-nails fell off, along with the skin from the soles of his feet. When he finished his Wainwright Round a decade later, at the age of 50, both ankles were rubbed through to the nerve, and his throat and tongue were so swollen that he could barely speak, let alone eat or drink. His body was as vulnerable as yours or mine. It was his spirit that was different.
Part of his problem on that Wainwright Round was a rare Cumbrian heat-wave, which forced him, he admitted later, to dig 'deeper than I had ever had to reach, even in the most serious mountain conditions… I just do not have the words to describe the discomfort, the physical pain, the frustration, and the worry.'
At other times, he battled through more traditional forms of unhelpful weather. When he set his 63-peak 24-hour record in 1972, an atrocious storm was raging. 'It did not seem possible that anyone could be moving on the mountains on a night like that,' recalled Chris Brasher, Olympic gold medallist and pioneering orienteer, who acted as Joss’s pacer for part of the route. Yet Joss simply refused to be demoralised by rain that, according to Brasher, 'drummed on my hood so fiercely as to obliterate thought'.
Brasher described that record as 'a memory equal to any of the greatest Olympic races that I have ever seen'. To Joss, however, it was just a warm-up for his 72-peak record three years later – which he accomplished in blazing heat that had his pacers dropping like flies.
Why didn’t Joss drop too? You could say that he was made of stronger stuff than the rest of us, but in the literal, physical sense the evidence suggests otherwise. Joss’s life was blighted by serious and occasionally agonising musculoskeletal problems, which he traced back to two seemingly minor childhood injuries. Repeated medical interventions – including removing two discs from his spine and all the cartilage from his right knee – may have made things worse, and by his early twenties he was a medical basket-case. He spent much of each day in pain and had to wear a special corset to protect himself from further damage. Doctors warned him to avoid strenuous physical activity, preferably including farm work.
But Joss hated defeatism, so he set out to rewrite his story. His father’s sheep wouldn’t look after themselves, so he ignored that part of the medical guidance. Nor, he eventually realised, had anyone specifically ruled out fell-running. So when the Lake District Mountain Trial based itself in Wasdale in September 1960, 24-year-old Joss decided to have a go. He didn’t have any running shoes, or shorts, and it was too late to enter anyway, but it was on his doorstep and, having made his spur-of-the-moment decision, he would not be dissuaded from it. He cut off his work trousers at the knee, and ran along unofficially in his heavy work boots.
There was no official distance, but it was emphatically not an event for beginners. The post-race consensus put it at about 15 miles, if you found the best route between the seven check-points. Joss found that part of the challenge easy – he spent most of his waking life out on these fells – and the roughness of the ground didn’t much bother him either. But the thousands of feet of rapid ascent and descent doubled the difficulty of the distance, and eventually cramp forced him to a standstill. Then he noticed some nearby picnickers who, remarkably, were able to reanimate his legs with salt. He limped home in what would have been fourteenth place, long after the leading contenders. Yet somehow this painful ordeal told him something that no one else could discern. He could be king of this sport.
It’s hard to grasp, looking back, how far-fetched an idea this was, back in 1960. But Joss was right. He had the two most crucial ingredients of fell-running greatness: love and understanding of the mountains, and an unconquerable spirit.
He threw away his corset, put all those doctors’ warnings to the back of his mind, got hold of some studded shoes, and began to compete regularly. It took him a few years to start winning races, and taking over the farm from his father (in 1963) didn’t leave him with much time for focused training. Yet by the late 1960s he had begun a purple patch that would last for over two decades – and would make him the most famous fell-runner the world had seen.
Again, it’s hard to grasp – from today’s perspective – how miraculous Joss’s achievements seemed at the time. Great leaps forward in running science, the surge in participation that came with the ultra-running and trail-running booms, the digitally-enabled pooling of fell-running know-how, and, not least, the raised expectations that result whenever the boundaries of sporting possibility are redrawn: all these have helped in recent years to bring a new breed of record-breakers to the fells, and Joss’s fastest known times have, one by one, been matched and broken. Back then, however, the mere idea that a runner might be able to conquer 72 peaks in 24 hours, or 214 in a week, was barely comprehensible. What kind of madman would even attempt such challenges, let alone accomplish them?
That was part of the Joss Naylor miracle: he refused to be limited by common sense. Another was the fact that nothing, not even his worsening back problems, seemed to stop him. In 1977 he was warned that four more discs in his spine had deteriorated irreversibly and that, if he didn’t stop farm-work, he risked spending the rest of his life in a wheelchair. So he got an indoor job, at the nearby Windscale (now Sellafield) nuclear power plant – but continued to look after his 1,000-strong herd of Herdwick sheep 'as a hobby'. He also continued to run on the fells, and to shrug off their discomforts with an apparent ease that other fell-runners found baffling.
For a long time he shrugged off age, too, although it may have slowed him down a bit. He was 50 when he did his 214 Wainwright peaks. A decade later, notwithstanding a particularly acute episode of back pain, he marked his 60th year with a 60-peak circuit (in 36 hours). In 2006 he did 70 (slightly smaller) peaks at 70, and although there was no '80 at 80' in 2016 (just a 30-mile run from Caldbeck to Wasdale), he was still running regularly on the fells in his mid-eighties. He had taken to spending his winters in Spain, to take the edge off the sciatic pain in his legs, but it was only after a stroke in 2021 that he really began to seem mortal.
He had long since become a national treasure by then. He had been honoured with an MBE (in 1976). He had featured in countless articles, books and documentaries, published one book (a short account of his 1986 Wainwrights Round called Joss Naylor MBE Was Here), co-authored another (Joss Naylor’s Lakes, Meres and Waters of the Lake District, with Vivienne Crow), been the subject of a biography (Joss, by Keith Richardson), had a racehorse named after him, had a song written about him ('The Joss Naylor Song') and been interviewed so often for radio and television that politicians envied him. 'I don’t know anything about fell-running,' sedentary Cumbrians often told me when I was researching my own fell-running book, Feet in the Clouds, 'although obviously I know about Joss Naylor.'
Yet somehow his celebrity status never affected his down-to-earth sense of his place in the world. He thought of his life in terms not of entitlements but of obligations: to his family, to his livestock, to his local community, to the landscape and, not least, to his sport. He said that he felt a bond with anyone who shared his love of the fells, and, whether or not he was competing, he rarely missed a local fell-race. Usually he could be seen congratulating those less gifted than him at the finish, or offering drinks and encouragement at strategic points. He often acted as a pacer, too, when other top runners had a go at the fells’ great solo endurance circuits and records. But he also took joy in lesser runners’ efforts, and the Joss Naylor Lakeland Challenge, a 48-mile circuit which he devised in 1990 as a challenge for runners over 50, is a lasting reminder of the interest he took in us.
He raised huge sums for local charities, too, especially with those big circuits to celebrate significant birthdays. The Brathay Trust, which offers life-changing outdoor activity breaks for children, young people and families in need, was a particular beneficiary. Yet when he wasn’t actively doing it, he rarely breathed a word about his decades of selfless fund-raising.
Once, years ago, I was chatting with Joss and the conversation drifted on to the topic of under-achieving footballers and their astronomical salaries. 'I just can’t understand how they can take so much out of the sport and put so little in,' he said. With Joss, it was the opposite mystery: how could one man put so much back into his sport, and take so little out?
For mediocre fell-runners like me, there was no greater boost to the morale than to catch a glimpse of Joss at a race; or, better still, to bump into him. The chances are he’d recognise you, no matter how slow and insignificant you were. Perhaps he’d offer advice, too, although it might be opaque ('Tha wants to get plenty a Guinness and cider down thee, lad…'). But in any case the encounter would leave you with a thrilling glow of renewed self-belief. It wasn’t that we ever imagined that we could do what Joss did. It was just that, well, if he could achieve so much, and shrug off so much, and find so much inner strength without making a big deal of it – well, maybe we could be just a little bit more like him.
As we waited for his hearse in the crowded lane, it occurred to me that, on balance, I am glad that so many of Joss’s records have been broken in recent years. It means that, now, they cannot steal his limelight. What mattered about Joss (as Ron Clarke said of Zátopek) wasn’t just what he did but how he did it. He was a great man as well as a great athlete, who achieved sporting immortality not through mere genetic good fortune but because of his unconquerable soul.
His obituaries dwell, rightly, on his achievements. But the fell-running community had come to Wasdale to remember Joss the man, and to give thanks for what he meant to us. 'If I hadn’t come,' said a middle-aged runner from South Shields, 'I’d never have forgiven myself.' I think most of us felt the same. Between us, by the end of the day, we would have run well over 10,000 miles across the fells – not to mention the hundreds of miles that many of us had driven to get to the fells in the first place – for no other purpose than to pay our respects. Yet none of us was surprised at such a turn-out. Fell-running is that kind of sport. It’s tough, plain-speaking and fiercely competitive, but also full of quiet kindness and mutual support. And Joss, through the way he played his part as the sport’s iconic hero in its formative years, did more than anyone to make it that way.
The funeral cortege reached the bridge. A sudden silence fell. A lone cornet sounded, and the throng of dusty fell-runners, still sticky from our morning’s exertions, began to walk ahead of the hearse, solemnly 'leading Joss home' up the lane to the church. Passing tourists stopped to marvel at the strange procession: a sad, slow, brightly-coloured stream, slowly flowing (in defiance of gravity) away from Wast Water.
We sang as we trudged – 'Swing Low, Sweet Chariot' – and this act of participation made Joss’s death seem suddenly much more real. This really was his last journey. Yet even then, for all the solemnity, there was something gloriously informal about the multitude: so many club colours, so many physiques, so much contrasting body language, old and young together. It felt like the start of a race, not the end.
Some runners had brought dogs with them: thirty or forty, by my reckoning. Joss loved his sheepdogs. ('He pampered them so much I don’t know how he ever got them to do any bloody work,' recalled his friend Ken Ledward.) So it seemed fitting to have some canine mourners.
There was, in any case, no question of any of us joining him in the church. St Olaf’s is the smallest in England, and there was barely room for the family. So we gathered in a field outside instead, listening to the proceedings on a PA system and joining in the prayers and hymns. I think we may have had the best of this arrangement, since we said our farewells to Joss in full view of the Wasdale fells.
The morning’s clouds had been burnt away by then, give or take a few shadows, and with a bit of neck-craning we could see with rare clarity the whole towering, green-grey ring of peaks that overlooked Joss’s life. Great End, Scafell, Yewbarrow, Pillar, Kirk Fell, Great Gable: you could almost feel the warmth trapped among the bracken and boulders on their lower slopes, and the unaccustomed dryness of their rocky tops. And for a moment I found myself wondering (as sometimes happens in mountains) how our world could possibly have so much beauty in it.
The thought seemed appropriate to the occasion; in fact, it barely makes sense to reflect on Joss’s life without thinking of Wasdale and its beauties. The valley was part of who he was. The fells, the creatures that lived on them, the people who lived, worked or ran there with him: these were what he lived for and, I suspect, the source of much of his strength. His life was hard, by most modern standards, with few material comforts and more than his share of physical hardship and pain. Yet the only pity he ever felt was for others. As he saw it, a man who lived his life in the heart of Wasdale lacked nothing that really mattered. 'Aren’t we lucky,' he often said, 'to have these glorious hills?'
There was a long, haunting silence at the end of the service, as his coffin was carried to the graveside. A few birds sang from the churchyard’s squat, ancient yews, and dogs panted among the mourners. Yet not a single bleat could be heard from the sheep-dotted hillside. Perhaps the usually vociferous Herdwicks could sense the magnitude of the moment; or perhaps they had been disconcerted by the surprisingly musical sound, moments earlier, of a thousand voices tenderly (and in some cases tearfully) singing the final hymn, 'Abide With Me'.
I almost wished I could have been up on the ridge, listening as our song filled the valley. 'Heaven’s morning breaks,' we sang, 'and earth’s vain shadows flee'; and as we did so the lingering shadow of a distant cloud drifted across the top of Kirk Fell and vanished. I know this because, even in that most poignant moment, some of my attention had drifted up to those high fells. Their drying turf and warming boulders seemed to cry out for a runner. And I imagined Joss, strong and tireless as in his prime, picking his line from peak to sunlit peak, placing his feet with the casual confidence of a sheepdog, gazing over his valley and rejoicing in the glory of one more Cumbrian day.
'I don’t worry about dying,' he told me once, 'but I’m going to miss these hills.' I wonder if he realised how much the hills would miss him.
Richard Askwith is author of Feet in the Clouds: A Tale of Fell-running and Obsession' (Aurum, £9.99).
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