Hell Gill Force

Waterfall on Hell Gill Beck at the head of the Mallerstang valley on the Cumbria/North Yorkshire border in the northern Pennines, England. It turns up in Four Thousand Weeks (Oliver Burkeman): rainy-morning solo moorland walk past Hell Gill Force, Burkeman’s example of an activity done for its own sake.

At a glance

Source	Author	Role	In one line
Four Thousand Weeks	Oliver Burkeman	setting	Rainy-morning solo moorland walk past Hell Gill Force, Burkeman’s example of an activity done for its own sake.

Four Thousand Weeks — Oliver Burkeman (2021)

Source: Four Thousand Weeks · Original · Readwise highlight

past a waterfall with a satisfyingly Satanic name— Hell Gill Force—and into open country, where the crunch of my walking boots sends startled grouse airborne from their hiding places in the heather.

• Role: setting
• In the book: Burkeman parks by the road on a rainy midsummer morning and walks alone into the high moors of the northern Yorkshire Dales, past the waterfall Hell Gill Force, across heather and past a disused stone church, to the moor top. He uses this ordinary country walk as his example of an atelic activity: a thing done for itself, with no outcome to achieve.
• Why it matters: The hike is the chapter’s concrete picture of ‘hiking as an end in itself’ and of the bleak, solitary terrain he loves. Set on a city pavement the walk would lose its point, but the specific Dales route is incidental; the waterfall is just the named waypoint.