Greenland: Attempting The Arctic Circle Trail

Let's pop off to Greenland to have a bash at the Arctic Circle Trail. In May, which is about a month before the season begins. I was curious to see how far I could go. As a spoiler I'll reveal that I got as far as the above, the Katiffik canoe hut about twenty miles away from Kangerlussuaq. I may not have completed the trail but I can truthfully say I have drunk fresh water from a frozen lake in Greenland.

What is the Arctic Circle Trail? It's a hiking route in the south-west of Greenland that runs from Kangerlussuaq to Sisimiut, on the coast. I was drawn by its simplicity. Greenland doesn't have any motorways or private property, at least not outside the towns. No fences, no industrial estates. You can in theory walk and pitch up a tent wherever you want, bearing in mind that anything you leave behind will pollute the place for years. It's the opposite of the UK, where every square inch of the land has been owned for centuries and everything is fenced off.

Greenland's hiking season runs from June to September. There are a few weeks at either end of the during which the trail is navigable, but outside those months the temperature plummets to minus 25 centigrade. At that point the trail is extremely dangerous unless you're well-prepared, or unless you hire a snowmobile, in which case it's still a little bit difficult because of the isolation. But (as you will discover) some hardy souls have made the trip in March. Yikes.

The trail is infamous for its mosquitos, midges, flies etc, because a lot of it is boggy marshland full of mosquito eggs. There are even bogs on hills, because after the snow melts it gets trapped by the permafrost. Why did I go in May? I was curious to see if the trail was navigable before the bugs come out. Perhaps I would blaze a trail. The frustrating thing is that the answer is almost. The trail isn't impassable, just very difficult. I landed in Greenland on May 17, gathered some supplies, and headed out from the parking lot just outside the airport.

Incidentally I totally missed that Vangelis died. Do you remember how there was a period in the early 2000s when every advert on TV had music by Moby? Rewind twenty years and advertisers used Vangelis instead, because his music sounded huge but had simple, bold melodies. He knew his way around a synthesiser without being obnoxious about it. Except when he was obnoxious, on e.g. Beaubourg or Invisible Connections. And The City. And lots of his other stuff. Let's just say he was erratic and self-indulgent when he didn't have a film director breathing down his neck.

Whatever his sins, his soundtrack for Blade Runner is cool beyond belief. By the 1990s the synth wizards of the 1970s had dated horribly, and their music sounded naff and old-fashioned, but Blade Runner was still cool. It has a timeless quality, despite the saxophones and electric pianos. Even if you grew up with Squarepusher and Aphex Twin, Blade Runner was credible. The sheer sonic presence of Vangelis' Yamaha CS-80 fed through a huge Lexicon digital reverb was awe-inspiring. With the exception of the end titles the soundtrack is mostly sprawling atmosphere, but what atmosphere. It still sounds like the future.

The futuristic Los Angeles of Blade Runner is supposed to be a nightmare, but there's something seductive about it. The rain, the lights, the hustle and bustle. A famous film director once said words to the effect that it was hard to make an anti-war film, because war is visually exciting. And so it is with futuristic urban squalor. I'm digressing here. Let's talk about the Arctic Circle Trail again.

What stopped me? Not the cold. I picked a window of good weather during which the sun was out, and if anything the heat was a major challenge because I had to chug down water. The sun fell below the mountains at about 23:00 and rose at about 04:00 (I'm being inexact because I was asleep) and although it was chilly from midnight to about midday it was never bitingly cold. If there had been a major snowstorm I might not have been so sanguine, but my sturdy coat, thick gloves, balaclava, rainproof hat etc were just dead weight in the end. What was the temperature? 7-12c, I'm not sure.

A well-travelled pair of Altberg Defenders. In this photo I've slathered them with dubbin after getting back to the UK, because after two weeks in Greenland they were very dry - they were no longer brown, instead they were desert-colour.

Was it my equipment? No. I've had my Altberg Defender boots for years. The original soles wore down quickly, but the company replaced them in 2018, and they're still going strong. They could have benefited from a padded insole of some kind but I have no complaints. Of the rest of my equipment the only serious piece of hiking kit was my Exped Lightning 60 backpack, which was comfortable and capacious, although the thin plastic straps and clips worried me. If one of them broke I would have been in a bind. But they didn't break.

It wasn't navigation that stopped me either. As pictured above I used a Motorola G7 Power mobile phone running OSMAnd as my map, with OpenStreetMap data. The Greenland download includes the Arctic Circle Trail, with some alternate routes marked as dotted lines. The trail officially passes clockwise around a mountain just before Katiffik, but the trail markings directed me along a dotted line that approached the hut counter-clockwise. It was more direct but harder, because it involved scrambling down a rocky hill. It's hard to visualise slopes with OSMAnd, but I never felt I was lost.

The G7 Power has an extended battery (hence the name; it's not faster or more powerful than the standard G7). I also took along a Moto G2 with OSMAnd as a backup, plus an old Garmin eTrex with Greenland's OpenStreetMap download as a second backup. After two days of navigation and photographs I was at about 84% battery with the G7. I also took along a power bank.

In practice the general outline of the trail is well-marked with cairns and orange dots, but it's very narrow - about a foot wide - and I had to divert from it several times, at which point it was hard to pick up the trail again. Most of the time the general thrust of navigation was obvious, but there were a few tricky parts, particularly while traversing hills. The trail appeared to be the most efficient route, short of walking across one of the frozen lakes, which would have been a really bad idea.

Was it the mosquitos that stopped me? No, I didn't see a single one. There were a couple of flies buzzing around the huts, but only a couple, and they weren't an issue.

Was it the food? Not an issue. I didn't feel hungry at all. I had to force myself to eat. I had to force myself to sleep as well, because it was light at midnight. Water? That was a problem. Greenland in May is dry. Parched. As I walked through the brush I kicked up big clouds of dust, and I can understand why the area has such a problem with wildfires. In the image above the ground was moist but the plants just above it were bone-dry, dried out by the sun. I developed a hacking cough and a bunged-up nose.

In May the lakes were mostly frozen solid, with only a few watering holes. There was plenty of water in the bogs, but it was rust-coloured, I assume from the copious amounts of animal poo. By the time I reached Katiffik I had broken out my stove and melted snow a couple of times, and it dawned on me that I was drinking snow that had probably been laying on the ground for several weeks. It wasn't yellow, and the only bits in it appeared to be grass and plants, but at the back of my mind it struck me that I really couldn't afford to develop diarrhoea in an area where I didn't have access to lots of water.

That preyed on my mind. The only way to get lots of water quickly was to melt it with a stove, which ate into my limited fuel reserves.

What stopped me in the end? If all of the trail had been like this it would have been easy:

Notice how the ice goes right up to the shore. And it's too thick to smash with my feet. Getting hold of lots of water quickly was a challenge. Notice also how the ground is bone-dry.

Relatively easy. There's a surprising amount of not-quite climbing. None of it is especially hard, but given that I was carrying fifteen kilograms of gear in unfamiliar terrain with no hope of rescue the thought of a twisted ankle also preyed on my mind. But on the whole a reasonably fit person should have no trouble with it.

A member of the armed forces would probably chuckle heartily at the thought of only having to carry fifteen kilograms. Throughout history a soldier's marching load has consistently hovered around 50kg, going all the way back to Roman times - soldiers are essentially asked to carry as much equipment as a fit human being can carry, which hasn't changed very much in two thousand years. In comparison 15kg is nothing, but on the other hand I'm not 18 any more and I enjoy the fact that I don't yet have busted hips, so 15kg it was.

In reality the shots above are atypical. That's why I took them. Those little patches of good ground stood out. In May most of the trail was actually like this:

Notice how in the second photo the trail is covered in snow. The trail is packed soil, so the snow doesn't just melt into the ground, it sticks around. And when it finally melts it accumulates in puddles that also stick around; the trail doesn't completely dry up until July and August. Furthermore the snow often rested on top of boggy ground. More than once I put my foot into a small patch of snow only to find the lower half of my leg plunging into a hidden muddy hole. As a result it was often easier to walk alongside the trail.

Easier, but not easy, because the edges of the trail are unsteady, boggy, and covered in sometimes very thick undergrowth. I took along a pair of hiking poles, which were useful for probing the ground ahead, but they often got caught in the undergrowth, and I continually found myself twisting my ankles left and right on unsteady ground. I left the first hut at 07:00 in the morning and arrived in the second hut, Katiffik, at 21:00. I took a three-hour rest at lunchtime, so it had taken eleven hours of hiking across an irritating bog to cover around eleven miles of ground.

In theory that's not awful progress. The Arctic Circle Trail is eighty miles long. Most people complete it in ten days, and after two days I had covered twenty miles. But the first ten miles were along a paved road, so that doesn't really count, and the ten miles of cross-country hiking were at my physical peak, before the accumulated wear and tear started to slow me down.

After resting my weary legs overnight in the hut at Katiffik I scouted out the path that runs alongside the lake, in the hope that it might be easier. Perhaps I could leave my backpack behind at the Katiffik hut and walk to the canoe centre and back, just to say I had seen it. However these two features made me decide to turn back after about another mile:

Neither of them were impassable - I walked a little bit beyond them to see if they were one-offs - but the thought of having to scramble up and down a coastal path for another eleven miles was the final straw. If I went on it would take longer than a day to recover from each day of hiking, and I would run out of camping fuel and therefore water. And I would be thirty miles from Kangerlussuaq instead of twenty.

So I saluted the hills - I bowed to them - and gracefully admitted defeat. You beat me, rocks and stones. And water flowing underground.

A rare source of fresh water that didn't involve prancing through mud or heating up snow. It tasted fantastic even without the psychological component. If Greenland ever runs short of cash it could try bottling the water and selling it abroad.

The yellow hut is a toilet block. I didn't use it. The water in the foreground is a small, muddy duck pond. The area around the hut had a few spent shell casings - a mixture of 6.5x55mm and 30-06, which is overkill for ducks, but also .222 - so I wonder if people take potshots at deer on the lake.

I briefly thought about recording an indie album in the hut, but I didn't have enough garmonbozia.

Some spent shell casings. Could I have brought them home in my checked baggage? Probably not a good idea.

I decided to chill in the hut for a couple of days, because it's not often I get to relax in a remote hut next to a frozen lake in Greenland. Some people would pay good money to swap places with me.

The previous travellers had left some Ribena and Capri-Sun, and some Pringles that I didn't touch because they were probably soft. I tucked into my food supply in order to lighten the load:

I had spent some time before the trip working out how to cook rice efficiently, without wasting fuel. I found that the rice would essentially cook itself in the pot cosy while I used my stove to make coffee. The tinned pork was awful but the rice was nice. It deserved better than tinned pork, but the shop at Kangerlussuaq has a limited selection of food:

Why is my water bottle yellow? I bought along some Crystal Light powdered lemonade. For some reason it's not widely available in the UK. It looks like cocaine, which is why I left it in the packet.

The hut was relatively clean, warm, with bedding for in theory four people, six people if you're part of a group, potentially ten or so in an emergency if there was a snowstorm.

From the moment I set foot on the trail in the afternoon of 17 May to the moment I returned to civilisation five days later I didn't see anyone else. Not even from a distance. I was worried that the huts would be occupied and I would have to make small talk, but no. Not a single person for miles around. When the wind died down and the birds settled there was dead silence.

Ironically all four canoes were there - during the hiking season they get scattered about the lake - but they were useless to me because the water was frozen.

The only evidence of human activity was the occasional high-altitude aeroplane. Is it an A340? It looks too slim to be an A380:

At a distance of almost eight miles the people in that airliner were closer to me than anybody else in the world.

While in the hut I tried something out. I brought along a shortwave radio and a cable to connect it with my mobile phone so I could record the airwaves. I wasn't sure what I would hear in Greenland, twenty miles from the nearest settlement. Radar noises from Kangerlussuaq? In the end the only shortwave station I picked up was a fire-and-brimstone religious station, in English, at the following wavelength, shortwave band five (not eight):

After my legs had recovered I headed back. It took me eight hours to cover the distance in the other direction, shaving off three hours. Perhaps I took fewer photographs, or perhaps I was more certain of the route. Subjectively it felt as if the direction from Kangerlussuaq -> Sisimiut had a lot of gradual uphill climbs with occasional steep descents, while on the way back it felt as I was going downhill more often.

On the way back I found my own footprints, and no-one else's:

Incidentally the first hut is pretty poor. It's an elaborate caravan that provides shelter, but it has no ventilation, so the interior is dusty and smells of petrol. When I arrived a bird had got trapped inside and died. I gave it a dignified burial. The most recent guestbook entry was from 19 March 2022, from a ten-person group who had braved incredible temperatures:

Flicking through the books at the two huts it appeared that COVID had nixed most of the 2020 season, and the 2021 season was pretty sparse. From August 2021 to around March 2022 no-one had written in the first hut's book. From a British perspective the idea that a place could be deserted for six months is extraordinary.

The first hut

This is where people dump the stuff they bought in Kangerlussuaq that they aren't going to use. A huge non-sealable tin of mixed vegetables in water strikes me as a poor choice for hiking.

I was tempted by this packet. I've eaten MRE food that expired long before December 2019. But there looks to be a hole, so I didn't risk it.

There's a plan to build a simple road between Kangerlussuaq and Sisimiut, or at least to the canoe centre, or to the Katiffik hut. Which would make commercial sense because the lake is a potentially fun destination that's very difficult to reach. But it would make the Arctic Circle Trail pointless, or at least absurd. As of May 2022 the groundwork extends to the vicinity of the first hut, which is just visible off in the distance here (it's the tiny greenish dot between two frozen bodies of water):

I'm not an engineer, but the road strikes me as a money pit. A lot of country roads in the UK are full of potholes, and I imagine that building and maintaining a road in the challenging conditions of Greenland is much harder. Despite the drainage channels this section has subsided:

Technically I'm trespassing at this point, for which I apologise. I touched nothing.

It's going to cost a lot of money to keep it running. Greenland is not the only place on Earth where there is a conflict between the economic needs of the people who live there and of the people who visit. Are the people who walk the Arctic Circle Trail a vital part of the economy, or just a bunch of posh foreigners? Who admittedly have a lot of money.

Who is Greenland for? Local people driving around on quadbikes, shooting animals and being uncouth, or sophisticated foreign travel bloggers - documentarians - such as myself? I'll have you know that I visited Chernobyl just before it was cool again. I took along a pair of half-frame film cameras with expired film. Expired film! That makes me a documentarian.

Expired slide film, no less.

Not just a traveller. A documentarian. Incidentally I didn't take along any expired film to Greenland. I took along my trusty Fuji S3, because it has a high-dynamic-range sensor and uses AA batteries, so I only had to bring one charger:

It also doesn't weigh very much. The S3 is very, very old, with a resolution of only six megapixels, but it's one of only two digital SLRs with Fuji's high-dynamic-range SuperCCD sensor. About half of the pictures in this blog post were taken with my mobile phone, the other half - the more colourful half - were taken with the S3.

Do I have any photo tips for the Arctic Circle Trail? Unless you go as part of a group and can spread the load, or you have an assistant, take one lens. One lens. Not two. You're not going to stop to switch lenses. Consider a compact camera. You're going to get mighty sick of (a) putting down your backpack to take out your camera (b) having a camera banging on your chest for mile after mile after mile (c) asking your assistant to hand you the camera and then having to wait for him to pull it out of his backpack etc.

Ultimately the weight of the S3 wasn't a problem, but instead the awkwardness of stowing it and unstowing it was a pain. You'll notice that most of the nicer photos were taken when I stopped to make camp, not while on the move.

Anything else? A few years ago the beginning of the trail was marked with concrete blocks, which I assume were planted to check out the solidity of the ground. This has now grown into a small construction site that you have to walk around, as pictured above. I admit that I walked around the "no entry" signs but picked up the road just after that, which is technically cheating, but as mentioned up the page it would have felt slightly absurd to walk alongside a dirt track just for the sake of purity.

Sadly the radar facility at Kellyville, with its iconic POP 7 sign, has been defunct since 2018:

I wonder if anybody will buy the huts. It's a short drive into town and the scenery is nice. I can't recall if Kangerlussuaq's mobile phone reception stretched as far as Kellyville. Perhaps if you were writing a novel - with a typewriter - one of the huts would be a quiet retreat. Or perhaps if you had swindled a major cryptocurrency exchange of five million Euros' worth of currency you could lay low for a while. That's just an example.

Kangerlussuaq is £500 and four hours from Copenhagen, so if you live a life of leisure and want to relax in Greenland and commute back to Copenhagen once a month for shopping it would only cost around £6k a year to do that. This is assuming there is a rental market in Kangerlussuaq. I have no idea. I mention this because the idea of writing blog posts while living in Greenland is seductive.

Let's talk about the gear. Here's a shot of my pack on the trail. I put it down to get some water:

It's an Exped Lightning 60. A simple 60 litre rucksack with one large internal compartment and a dry-bag style closure at the top. It has a metal bar that leads from the shoulders to the lumbar support pad as a back support, plus hip clinchers that transfer some of the weight to your hips. I didn't have a problem with it at all. I'm about six feet tall, and with the adjustable lumbar pad at its fullest extent it fit me perfectly. In the photo above I've strapped a second bag to the outside, mostly empty.

My original choice was a Sierra Designs Flex Capacitor 40-60, which is similarly minimalist, but it struck me that the Flex Capacitor's big thing - it can be strapped tighter or looser to change its capacity - would be pointless because I would never use the smaller sizes. I also tried out an Exped Lightning 45, but it was just too small. The 45 litre pack was enough for my sleeping bag, tent, stove, clothes, mattress, a tiny bit of food, but nothing else.

As you can see, even with a 60 litre pack I still had to carry a second bag with my toiletries (and an Ikea Dimpa into which I packed the Exped Lightning for travel; I took the Dimpa with me because it might come in handy). Sierra Designs makes a 60-75 litre model, which would probably carry everything. Alternatively, if you want to do things cheaply, there's a widely-available British Army deployment bag with a capacity of 90-100 litres for around £30. It has shoulder straps but no internal structure or lumbar support of any kind. Could you hike with it? Possibly but the sheer size might be awkward.

Incidentally Copenhagen Airport has a bunch of bag storage lockers in the P4 parking area, which cost about 80DKK for 24 hours. I used them on the way back so I could have a brief look around Copenhagen itself:

There are some nutters who believe that ancient Egyptians resembled African-Americans. This is of course nonsense because America did not exist in the Middle Ages. Checkmate!

Here's what I took:

According to EasyJet's scales it came to around 12kg, plus another couple of kg for my coat, sundry miscellaneous items, and the extra food I bought in Kangerlussuaq. I used the green waterproof drybag as a portable washing machine / indoors foot-bathing machine, which worked surprisingly well. I put in my dirty socks and underwear along with some liquid soap, whirled it around, squished it, rinsed it out, and I had clean clothes.

I took along a generic three-season sleeping bag, plus a vapour barrier inner liner which isn't pictured because it's inside the sleeping bag. The vapour barrier liner is essentially a plastic bag aimed at people who sleep in very cold temperatures. It's designed to stop your perspiration from wicking away your body heat. I found it mostly useful as a sheet to go under the sleeping bag.

My other idea was that I could use it as a waterproof cover for the sleeping bag in case I needed to sleep in the open, perhaps if I injured myself and couldn't pitch my tent, or if the weather was warmer than I expected and I found a patch of dry ground. I didn't try this out. Also pictured is a drybag with clean clothes, a collapsible water container - remember that you need a second bottle to fill the collapsible container from a stream, because the water makes the container collapse - plus a carbon fibre tent pole, and in the blue bag there's a Six Moons Lunar Solo tent. I pitched this once, mostly to see if I could, although my pitch was quite frankly terrible:

Hiking poles have a mythical dimension. Some people laugh at them; some people swear by them. I bought them as a backup in case my tent pole shattered, but they did come in useful on the unsteady, boggy terrain.

My aged iPad Mini 2 was useless on the move but indispensable in town. You'll notice that I didn't take a satellite phone; that was my decision, I don't suggest you copy me. If I had gone mad and tried to walk over the ice and fallen in my body would probably have washed to shore some time in July, but would anybody ever find it? I have no idea. The trail is fairly popular, but even so a lot of Greenland is very sparsely travelled. Some of those hills in the distance might never have had anybody stand on them, ever. Or perhaps an Inuit hunter rested there once, four hundred years ago, and never again.

The Trangia pot is stuffed full of things. The shop in Kangerlussuaq had Coleman butane fuel, but not meths, or ethanol, or any kind of alcohol fuel:

The shop also had a bunch of hiking gear, but it was Argos-style equipment, e.g. "chain store adds some cheap hiking equipment to its range" rather than "the super-hardcore outdoors shop underneath Hungerford Bridge that sells specialist equipment to deep sea divers". I suggest you bring your own.

Pictured above is a third-party butane adapter for my Trangia. On the whole this is a better option than the original spirit burner, although the burner has the advantage of being able to use anything sufficiently alcoholic, including hand gel. The enclosed firestriker worked well enough that I didn't bother with matches or a lighter. Is a Trangia overkill? It didn't weigh much, and with a claw-style butane burner I would still need a pot and a windbreak. The pots were useful for scooping up snow.

This is how I went to the toilet:

Not pictured is some Dr Bronner's super-concentrated liquid soap, and a trowel. I also brought along some wet wipes, but I didn't use them. It's gross, but it works, and I don't have intestinal parasites so I obviously did something right. Here are some waterproof socks, and the coat I took along:

The waterproof socks were mostly a waste of time. They're thick and comfy, and less sweaty than I expected, but they did eventually get wet, at which point it was difficult to dry them out again. On the whole a foldable pair of slippers or sandals would have been a better idea.

Note that the ice to the right of the image is about an inch thick, and I saw deer on the lake, so this little bit of freshwater access was very rare. The coat is an Austrian army surplus M65-style model. I bought it for my trip to Chernobyl because I wanted something tough, but also cheap, in case I had to throw it away - in case it became covered in radioactive dirt, for example. I also wanted something with lots of pockets. Passport, phone, notebook, hands.

On the downside it weighs a tonne and is huge. On the positive side I never got cold. The moment I put it on I was warm. It also kept off the sun. It's tough, as well, and if I had fallen into some bracken I wouldn't have been scratched to bits. On the whole however it was overkill. Too much weight for too little gain. I think it's aimed at people who need to stand around in the cold all day.

As with the cold-weather gloves, balaclava, leg compression stockings, and leggings, the big coat is something I would replace or eliminate if I ever attempt the trail again. It's a nice coat, but decades out of date. Did I mention the wildlife? Greenland's polar bears are all on the far side of the ice cap, so they aren't an issue. Along the trail I saw a mixture of musk ox, deer, surprisingly huge arctic bunnies, birds - they sounded like frogs - and goats. With the exception of the birds they all saw me first. They gazed at me before running uphill. The bunny in the image above just vanished, but rabbits are cunning and full of tricks. They have a thousand enemies and they know it.

And that's the Arctic Circle Trail. My tip - don't try to out-think the professionals. Go in July or August. None of the equipment I took let me down, and despite tricky conditions my pace was in theory good enough, but the mud and ice stopped me because I went too early. General Winter had packed his camp but hadn't quite left yet.

Keeping Sane on the Arctic Circle Trail

How did I keep sane on the trail? Luckily I had excellent company. Myself! I had Ashley Pomeroy as a travel companion. He's entertaining and endlessly fascinating. Far more interesting than most people. More interesting than me, even. He wrote a great blog post about his attempt at the Arctic Circle Trail. It began with "let's pop off to Greenland to have a bash at the Arctic Circle Trail". It's on the internet. You can read it.

But I also brought along some inspiring hiking films to watch on my iPad. Films I was vaguely familiar with, but I only knew the rough outline. Lightweight, happy stuff so that I didn't get depressed. The first was Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man, which is the heartwarming tale of a chap called Timothy Treadwell, who lives with bears in Alaska. I haven't watched it yet but it'll be interesting to see what kind of tips he has to share. Bears aren't so tough.

I also downloaded Into the Wild, which is the heartwarming tale of a chap called Christopher McCandless. Despite minimal training and no experience he lives off the land in Alaska. Has he ever met Timothy Treadwell? I don't know. It'll be interesting to see what kind of tips he has to share. I also downloaded Into Thin Air, a classic piece of adventure literature about some kind of expedition to Mount Everest in 1996. Loads of people attempted the summit that year. It must have been very crowded. I wonder how they all got back safely.

I also downloaded Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father, which is some kind of documentary. It won a bunch of awards. It's Canadian so it must be nice. And The Bridge, which is about the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. I've always wanted to visit San Francisco because it's a happy place. When you're tired of San Francisco you're probably very tired.

I haven't watched or read any of those things yet, but if I ever get depressed and need a pick-me-up I'm sure they'll do the trick. Incidentally, have you ever heard of Immanuel Velikovsky? He was big back in the 1960s and 1970s. He was one of those self-taught scholars who had a number of unusual ideas about ancient history, along the lines of the ancient aliens theorists, although he wasn't interested in aliens as such.

The general consensus nowadays is that his theories were all wrong, but they're still intriguing. Even in the 1960s he was dismissed as a crackpot, but the scientific establishment dismissed him so hard - they hated him - that he became something of a martyr to the counterculture.

His works revolved around the study of ancient legends from all around the world. He had two theories. The first was that the floods, earthquakes, fires in the sky etc that appear in ancient legends were the result of Venus and Mars careering through the solar system. That idea was soundly debunked by the astronomical community and no-one takes it seriously nowadays.

The second was more interesting. He noticed that the histories of ancient Egypt and ancient Israel had a bunch of similarities, but they were separated by about six hundred years. If you took the history of Israel and moved it forward six hundred years, parts of it matched the history of Egypt. His argument was that the myths and legends of those two civilisations were the same events described from slightly different perspectives, and that our chronology of Egypt was wrong.

It followed therefore that some historical figures separated by hundreds of years might actually be the same people, described by different cultures. For example he believed that Hatshepsut, who ruled Egypt during the 14th century BC, was actually the Biblical Queen of Sheba, who existed - if she ever existed at all - several hundred years later according to conventional wisdom. He went so far as to argue that some Egyptian pharaohs were duplicates, and others had never existed at all.

This idea was also rejected by the establishment, although it was harder to dismiss it entirely because so much of ancient history is lost and open to interpretation. Today Velikovsky belongs to a group of thinkers whose ideas are not necessarily awful, it's just that they didn't manage to amass sufficient proof to make a robust case. I admit that I'm not a historian.

As I pondered the thoughts of Velikovsky I wondered if his theories could be applied to more recent history. For example, when I was young there was a shared fictional universe that appeared in numerous films and television programmes. Where Eagles Dare, A Bridge Too Far, Kelly's Heroes etc were all filmed in different countries, with almost entirely different creative teams, but they all had a set of shared ideas. There was a villainous group who dressed in black or grey, with angled helmets. Armoured vehicles with a stylised cross on the side. A conflict involving combined arms in the European theatre.

What if - bear with me - what if those films all described an actual historical event? What if it was the same historical event, but from different perspectives? And so I set about building a timeline that would unify all of these different things - not just the aforementioned films, but also Hogan's Heroes, Saving Private Ryan, Love Story, Cross of Iron, Conan the Barbarian etc. Certain elements suggested that the event took place no later than the 1950s. The presence of a Bell 47 helicopter in Where Eagles Dare dated the narrative to no earlier than 1946. Obviously the actors couldn't have been adults during the event otherwise they might have met themselves.

So I developed a theory. There had been a major armed conflict in Europe at some point in the late 1940s, early 1950s, involving the armed forces of Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States, to a lesser extent the Soviet Union. And after poring through some history books I realised that this conflict had actually happened! It was called the Second World War. And although my dates weren't exactly correct they were very close.

I intend to develop this theory further. For now I leave you to your sweet sorrow, goodbye.