Philip Freakley

After leaving their academic careers in 2002, Philip and Vivien Freakley moved to the Haute Ariege region of the French Pyrenees to indulge a lifelong passion for mountains and the natural world. They are, by inclination, fair weather walkers and discovered the mountains of Southern Catalunya during an escape from a particularly cold and snowy Pyrenean winter. In 2004 they bought a house there and have spent the subsequent five winters exploring, talking to local walkers, translating Catalan route descriptions, knitting together apparently unrelated scraps of footpath and encouraging everyone to build cairns.