Country Diary: Lake District

Buckbarrow, Glade How, Cat Bields, Haycock, Brandreth, Dale Head, Robinson, Wandhope and Blencathra might be railway stations in a Betjeman poem. And Wasdale hero Joss Naylor might have been "the train now arriving" three Sundays ago on the longest day of the year as he drew in at each one in turn on his trans-Lakes run to commemorate his 50 years of running the fells.

At Braithwaite and on the tops of Newlands and Honister passes, his daughter Sue, a trained masseuse, kneaded his knotted leg muscles. He is 73, with creaking joints, a rickety back ("It's buggered") and one leg so wasted he can grasp the thigh in both hands. Yet the crossing of these tops would have defied many younger men. In 16,000ft of climbing, his joints occasionally locked up. "You just run through it," he said after tearing a calf muscle in training, believing in "working" a broken part, not resting it.

This he did on Robinson when cramp assailed him and he had to take salt, and above the Pots of Ashness on Seatallan, when a crippling pain in his middle back stopped him dead. But not for long as, teeth gritted, he ran onwards, ploughing through bracken, scrambling up among crags or chasing down clanking stones of scree. And there finally, on the top of the sugar loaf of Buckbarrow with the flash of a sunlit Wastewater below and, beyond, the backdrop of the Screes (down which he has been filmed descending in bounding leaps), was home. Running from Mungrisdale to Greendale Bridge is an outstanding feat for anyone traversing these tops, let along a septuagenarian. He didn't seem to think it anything unusual, preferring instead to see the good that might come out in the shape of donations to Eden House Children's Hospice, his chosen charity for the event.