CROSS FELL, at 2,930 feet, is the highest mountain in England outside the Lake District. Undeterred by cold winds and boggy plateaus, last Saturday the Bishop of Lancaster, Paul Swarbrick, led prayers and reflections on the life of John Bradburne as a motley group of thirty pilgrims, including a South African Franciscan priest in his habit and a black labrador called Megan, scaled the Pennine escarpment.

Bradburne, born in 1921 in the nearby village of Skirwith, where his father was the rector, ascended Cross Fell regularly in his childhood. He served with the Gurkhas and Chindits in the Second World War and converted to Catholicism in 1947, going on to serve victims of leprosy in a settlement at Mutemwa, Zimbabwe. He was brutally murdered in 1979 as the civil war reached its bloody climax.