Do you have your own hill quest? Cotswolds cyclist looking to tick off almost 600 local climbs

Simon Boswell has been aided in his hill quest by Tony Payne who volunteered to take a corresponding ‘armchair quest’ to identify them.

“After much discussion over what constitutes a ‘hill’ we decided to exclude anything with under 10m of 14% climb. This is somewhat arbitrary but it seems to successfully exclude steep drives while including short hills. This still leaves nearly 600 hills to climb.”

This map, created from freely available Ordnance Survey road and elevation data sets, is the result and there is also a corresponding map, based on Boswell’s Strava logs, which shows which ones he’s ticked off so far.

Boswell says there is something about the psychology of cycling for fun rather than for speed which he feels sites like Strava don’t really promote, but points out that the use of GPS data allows cycle tourists to share ideas and build their own leaderboards.

"I’d be interested to find out from other readers whether anyone else has got some of these ‘quests’. There are obviously some more obvious ones – long routes, all the hills in the Top 100 Climbs list, etc – but what about the more esoteric ones? Is there an equivalent to the ‘visiting all 92 league grounds in the country’ type of quest?”

He points to Cycling UK’s British Cycle Quest challenge as being another example, although he notes the most recent leaderboard is dated January 2015.

So, do you have your own hill quest or similar? Let us know below.