King of the Fells | Remembering Joss Naylor

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On Friday, June 28, 2024, the news broke that the ‘King of the Fells’ had run his last race. Joss Naylor, a legendary figure in the world of fell-running, had died aged 88. He passed away peacefully in the company of family and friends, following a battle with his health since a stroke in 2021. The sad news sparked an outpouring of love and affection from running communities across the globe.

Stuart Ferguson, chairperson of the Fell Runners Association, led the online tributes, stating “Joss inspired so many and will forever be remembered for what he gave to our unique sport.” Richard Askwith, author of cult fell-running book Feet In The Clouds, described Joss in an emotive obituary for the Guardian as a “towering figure in the world of fell-running admired for his charisma, tenacity and the domination of his sport”, someone whose “greatest feats of endurance....were accomplished far from the public gaze in the clouded hills of Cumbria, but the unprecedented extremity of his achievements, and the hardiness that made them possible, captured the imagination of mountain lovers everywhere”.

Nicknamed ‘Iron Joss’ or ‘Iron Man’, in recognition of his steely grit in the face of horrific storms and horrendous terrain, Joss Naylor rose to prominence for his pioneering feats of endurance running during the 1970s and ‘80s. The sheep farmer from Wasdale broke the Lake District 24-hour record three times and ran the fastest known times for the Three Peaks challenge, the Welsh 3,000ers and the Pennine Way.

In a world where elite sport is now so scientific and data driven, Joss was adored even more for his old school approach. He was a throwback to a bygone era and an emblem of simpler, more wholesome times. He ran with plenty of heart, but without a heart-rate tracking GPS watch or a hydration vest stuffed with energy gels. He wore basic kit – typically, a vest, shorts and a battered pair of Walsh shoes – and was powered by apple pie and rock-cakes. The rest was down to near-superhuman levels of grit and determination.

Joss famously ran all 214 Wainwright fells in just over seven days in 1986 – a record that remained unbeaten for almost three decades until 2014 – and, not to be defeated by the slow creep of Father Time, he kept on going hard into later life. To celebrate his 60th birthday, he ran 60 Lakeland fells and remarkably, aged 70, he repeated the feat, ticking off 70 summits and covering 50 miles and 25,000ft of ascent in just 21 hours. In 2007 he was appointed an MBE for services to sport and charity. Joss was also a patron for the Brathay Trust and his running challenges raised about £40,000 for the youth charity between 2007 and 2019.

Joss’s final journey to his resting place will take place on Friday, July 19, at St Olaf’s in Wasdale Head – the smallest parish church in England. True to the spirit of ‘Iron Joss’, fell runners from across Cumbria and the rest of the UK are planning to run across the mountains into Wasdale Head to attend the ceremony. It was Joss’s wish that his funeral should be “a colourful celebration of his life...and attending fell runners should dress in their club colours”.

A colourful funeral seems an apt send-off to such a colourful life – one that, on the surface at least, never seemed destined for greatness. Born on February 10, 1936, at Middle Row Farm in Wasdale Head, Joseph “Joss” Naylor spent his formative childhood years in a quiet, remote valley in the western edges of the Lake District National Park, under the shadow of mighty Scafell Pike and Great Gable, and next to England’s deepest lake, Wast Water.

He attended school in the nearby village of Gosforth, but his hardiness was forged on the family sheep farm. By age seven, he was helping his father fix dry stone walls, milk cows and round up sheep from the fells. Of these early days, Joss said: “You’d set off into the fells on only a basin of porridge and walk all day – this got me used to travelling long distances with little food.” Perhaps, almost by accident, a perfect mix of ingredients – a tolerance for physical hardship, an intimate knowledge of the fells, a deep passion for nature – were beginning to shape a running hero of the future.

But, if his childhood was a good training ground, Joss’s early years were not without setbacks. In fact, he was an accident-prone child – unlucky at best, calamitous at worst – and doctors even once advised him to refrain from strenuous exercise, and pronounced him unfit for national service.

First he suffered a wrestling accident, and then injured his spine while climbing a fence. He had all of the cartilage removed from one of his knees and, for many years, he wore a medical corset for his chronic back pain, following the removal of two discs from his spine. But, in a reincarnation akin to Forrest Gump ditching his childhood callipers and running 15,248 miles across America, Joss would not let his injuries get in the way of his running dreams.

His first race was the Mountain Trial in 1960, starting in his home village of Wasdale. Joss chucked away his medical corset, lopped off the lower legs of his work trousers to create makeshift running shorts, and – because he didn’t own any trainers – was forced to don his heavy work boots. But despite the limitations of his kit, the onset of cramp towards the end of the race, and his father’s disapproval of running as a “waste of time”, Joss caught the running bug. He had glimpsed his life’s calling – and the seeds of a running legend were beginning to sprout.

Over the next few years Joss continued to race, honing his craft and building his fitness – fitting everything around the demands of farm life, having taken over the family business in 1962. By the late 1960s, ‘Iron Joss’ had found his groove and the wins started to rack up with unrivalled consistency, with his golden streak lasting for almost two decades.

Ten victories in the Mountain Trial demonstrated Joss’s dominance over technical terrain, as did nine wins in a row (1968-1976) on the gruelling Ennerdale Horseshoe race, and Joss’s supremacy over his competitors continued with wins at almost all of fellrunning’s biggest events, including the Karrimor Mountain Marathon (now the Original Mountain Marathon), the Welsh 1,000m Peaks and the famed Duddon Valley and Wasdale fell races.

But organised races were only the start. Joss’s reputation was elevated to legendary status courtesy of his solo mountain challenges – record-breaking feats of ultra distance endurance in the Lake District fells, where one man pitted himself against the brutality of the mountains, and came out on top.

It kicked off with the Bob Graham Round (BGR) in 1971. The 66-mile loop of 42 Lake District fells, first completed by Keswick hotelier Robert Graham in 1932, is England’s premier fell-running challenge and a rite of passage for ambitious mountain runners across the globe. Starting and finishing at Moot Hall in Keswick, you have to get round in 24 hours or under, and be witnessed by pacers at every top. It’s not for the faint-hearted. But it was no match for Joss. He became only the sixth person to complete the gruelling run, and then – in a show of Olympic-like confidence and fortitude – set about extending it.

A year later, in the midst of a near-apocalyptic storm, Joss ticked off 63 peaks in 24 hours, a new record, and then raised the bar yet again to 72 peaks in 1975. Co-founder of the London Marathon and Olympian Chris Brasher, who paced Joss on one of his 1972 BGR legs, could barely believe the levels of resolve and bravery he witnessed, describing Joss as “the greatest of them all”.

More endurance records fell throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Venturing out of his beloved Cumbria, Joss set a new record for bagging the Welsh 3,000ers – 14 peaks in Snowdonia over 3,000ft high – in 1973. A year later, in 1974, Naylor ran the entire length of the 268-mile Pennine Way in three days, four hours and 36 minutes, taking 24 hours off the previous record. In 1976 he followed in the footsteps of another Lake District icon – guidebook writer Alfred Wainwright – and ran Wainwright’s 185-mile Coast to Coast route from St Bees in Cumbria to Robin Hood’s Bay in North Yorkshire in just 41 hours, finishing with none of his toenails intact, but with his myth further enhanced.

In 1980 Joss ticked off the 84-mile Hadrian’s Wall path in just under 11 hours, and in 1983 he pioneered a new 105-mile route linking all 26 of the Lake District’s lakes, meres and waters, finishing in a staggering 19 hours and 14 minutes.

But, of all his achievements, it was perhaps Joss’s 1986 run of all 214 Wainwrights that will be forever etched in the history books. Aged 50, ‘Iron Joss’ completed a continuous, non-stop round of the Wainwrights in seven days, one hour and 25 minutes, covering some 300 miles and climbing the height of multiple Everests from sea level. His record stood until 2014, a remarkable 28 years, and inspired the exploits of a new generation of endurance runners, including Steve Birkinshaw, Sabrina Verjee, John Kelly and Paul Tierney.

In fact, Joss may have broken the seven day barrier, had he not stopped during his run to rescue a lamb trapped in a mud hole. It’s a wonderful anecdote that, perhaps, sums up the legacy of ‘Iron Joss’ best. He was a brilliant fell runner, who ran with heart and possessed a bottomless well of courage in the face of hardship, but it was his modest and wholesome personality that really captured minds and imaginations. For Joss, fell-running was simply part of his deep love for the mountains, for nature and for the Lake District – and that’s something we can all learn from him. He will be forever missed.

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James Forrest is a former newspaper reporter turned outdoors and adventure travel writer. He is the author of Mountain Man: 446 Mountains. Six Months. One Record-Breaking Adventure, voted The Great Outdoors magazine's book of the year in 2019, and is best-known for completing a three-year mission to climb 1,001 mountains across the UK and Ireland.