Comparing the rain-lashed mountain of Helvellyn to Hawaii was quite the overstatement | Steve Canavan

Namely that, in 1926, a plane landed on it.

Which is astonishing and something I’ll get to in a moment – but first let me tell you about the walk, for it is worth briefly recounting.

I went with my friend who assured me that despite the grim inclement weather, there would be a cloud inversion, which is a sort of low-lying sea of cloud that, when one breaks through, reveals a brilliant blue sky and sunshine.

‘We’ll be wearing T-shirts and shorts on the top,’ he said, cheerily.

I began to question this when, half a mile or so into our hike, two men approached from the opposite direction.

They were soaking wet and freezing and looked if not close to death then at least as if they’d shaken hands with him then run away.

‘Erm, have you come down from the top?’ I asked nervously.

‘Yes,’ gasped the one who still had enough energy to speak. ‘You’re not going up are you? Make sure you’re well prepared – it’s hell.’

I was all for quitting there and then but my friend reassured me he’d read the forecasts and to trust him. Two hours later, as I huddled in a shelter atop Helvellyn, face battered by golf ball-sized hailstones, and worrying about losing several of my toes to frostbite, my mate shook his head and muttered, ‘forecasters must have got it wrong – definitely meant to be sunshine’.

My only solace came when, on the way back down, where the weather was still relatively calm, we passed and briefly spoke to an impossibly good-looking young couple just beginning their ascent.

The male looked like a model and wore a Berghaus walking jacket unzipped to the belly button to reveal his chest hair, which obviously annoyed me.

‘What’s it like on top?’ he asked.

‘Absolutely beautiful, you push on,’ I replied. ‘In fact you should take your whole top off, it’s like Hawaii up there.’

Granted I would have felt a pang of guilt had I later discovered two young walkers perished that afternoon, but I’ve not seen it anywhere in the newspapers so hopefully they made it down…

But back to the aeroplane. I found this astounding.

Planes back then were so flimsy and primitive that when Charles Lindbergh became the first to fly solo across the Atlantic he had a wicker seat instead of a regular pilot’s seat.

I don’t know about you but if I wandered onto an Easyjet and saw that, I’d have serious doubts about continuing with my trip to Lanzarote.

Before the Great War barely anyone had seen a plane. They took off, so to speak, during the conflict and so many were built that in 1920 the RAF auctioned off 10,000 surplus planes.

But a lot of the early designs were flawed and hugely unreliable and there were hundreds of crashes and fatalities. Planes literally fell from the sky every week – and so it was with some surprise that, near the summit of Helvellyn, I wandered past a smart plaque informing me that in 1926 a pilot – who was either very brave or very mentally imbalanced – had successfully landed and taken off again.

Naturally I did a bit of further reading and discovered the pilot in question was a chap named Bert Hinkler. He flew a two-seater Avro 585 Gosport from Woodford Aerodrome near Manchester to Helvellyn for no other reason than as a publicity stunt, so the aircraft manufacturer could boast it was the first plane to land on a mountain in the UK.

It’s important to point out here that they didn’t just rock up and land on the mountain. They did do a bit of forward planning, identifying the safest place to land, clearing the area of any rocks and boulders, and opening a check-in desk and a Costa coffee shop just near the trig point.

Hinkler made two attempts, on December 15 and December 21, but both times gave up because of bad weather and windy cold conditions.

Undaunted, Hinkler tried again on December 22. It proved third time lucky and the landing was surprisingly straightforward – the plane stopped quickly on a steep slope and into a strong headwind … though presumably any ramblers out that day got the fright of their lives when, halfway through supping coffee from a flask and eating a corned beef sandwich, they watched an aeroplane swoop in and land.

The take-off almost ended in disaster. Travelling up the slope and unable to gain much speed, the plane sort of fell off the edge of the cliff and narrowly missed Striding Edge before just about wobbling its way to safety with a no doubt hugely relieved pilot inside.

Sadly it was only a temporary reprieve for Hinkler. He died six years later when attempting to beat the record for fastest solo flight to Australia, he crashed into a mountain in Italy and died.

Still, he did set a marvellous little piece of history on Helvellyn, which nearly 100 years after it happened, I finally know about. And now you, dear reader, do too