Ten Tors 2011

"If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants"

Sir Isaac Newton, 1643 - 1727

Education passes to us the knowledge that our forefathers struggled, sometimes for millennia, to grasp. Great education helps us to look beyond the horizons of that learning towards those unknowns that still defeat us, and to spur us on; to cause us to ask again the questions Why...? - or Why Not...? or What if...?

Sometimes it's about an opportunity - the chance coincidence of time and place - which plants the seed of interest, the shadow of a thought that the limits we have taken to ourselves do not necessarily apply. We can unlearn what we believed to be a universal truth - and once we've done that, what else is possible?

Ten Tors is one such opportunity, and here is laid The Challenge! Are you up for a walk?

OK - a little more than a walk; a two day hike, calling in at ten checkpoints. Across Dartmoor, whose moods in whatever month of the year can change from benign to vindictive within an hour. The ten checkpoints will be on a set of tors - some of the many granite outcrops which are scattered across the moor, topping the hills between rivers and valleys, leats and mires. You won't find out which particular set of ten you'll need to visit until the day before you start, so a map and compass will be handy. Depending on your age, your route will be thirty-five, forty-five, or fifty-five miles long - but you will have five mates in your team to keep you company, and those two days to do it - which also means you'll have a night on Dartmoor. ...so there's some kit to carry: a tent, food, stove, clothes (wet- and cold-weather), sleeping bag...

You may have read the last paragraph and thought: 'That's impossible!...'

But there will be two thousand four hundred souls on the evening of Sunday, May 13th 2012, who, months before, will have asked themselves "What if...", and now will be wearing grins a mile wide. Not one of them will know the meaning of the word impossible.

Armed with that, who knows what else they might go on to do?

"[T]here are known knowns; these are things we know we know.
We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don't know we don't know."

Former United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
(for whom, I'm fairly sure, Ten Tors is an unknown unknown...)