Has it been realised that south-eastern England has lost its only “mountain”? No authoritative definition of what constitutes a mountain has ever been given, says a correspondent writing to “The Observer” (London), but in our school days we used to be taught that any height over 1,000ft., or 2,000ft. (according as we were brought up in a low-lying or a mountainous country) entitled the summit to the title of mountain. We of the south-east naturally clung to the lower height, for it enabled us to speak of Inkpen Beacon as “the only mountain in the south-east, and the only point that topped 1,000ft.,” and Surrey people were mortally hurt that Berkshire could overtop its highest peak of Leith Hill.
Hitherto the height of the collective range named as Inkpen Beacon was always shown as 1,011ft.—e.g., on a comparatively recent issue of Bartholomew’s famous two-miles-to-the-inch map. By a correction of the Ordnance Survey it has in recent days been dethroned—not from its supremacy—but from its giddy overtopping of the 1,000ft. Attention was drawn to this in a book lately written by Mr. Edric Holmer, but he got his figures wrong. The Ordnance Survey has just explained the actual position, which is as follows:—
Inkpen Beacon is on a northern fronting bastion of the Berkshire Downs, rather more than two miles in length, with two or three rises over the general height, the whole ridge or bastion top crossed by a more or less defined road or track above its north slope. The highest road levels are 955ft. (on Inkpen Beacon) and 959ft. (on Walbury Hill). Inkpen Beacon proper rises to a height several feet above the road level of 955ft., but this has not been accurately determined by the Ordnance Survey. Walbury Hill—the eastern-most point of the bastion—is the site of the Trigonometrical Survey Station called “Inkpen Beacon,” and the top of the hill at this point shows a height of 975ft.
The position, then, is that the old height of Inkpen Beacon—1,011ft.—no longer stands; that of the actual height of Inkpen Beacon proper is not determined, but that it appears to be less than 975ft., the height of Walbury Hill, chosen as the Trigonometrical Survey Station for the Beacon. But we have now nothing in the south-eastern counties that reaches 1,000ft., though, alas, Berkshire soars above Surrey by 10ft., Leith Hill, Surrey’s topmost point, rising only to 965ft.
The “alas” in the last paragraph suggests that this piece is from a Surrey newspaper.