Mountain Heights

This would be a TIL, but I actually learned this some time ago and just never blogged it.

Table Mountain, Cape Town, South Africa and Snowdon, Wales, United Kingdom are exactly the same height.

That height is 1,085m or 3,560ft.

Snowdon is the highest mountain in Wales, and the 19th highest in the British Isles. All the higher mountains in the British Isles are in Scotland (Ben Nevis being the highest at 1,354m/4,411ft), meaning that Table Mountain is higher than any point in England, Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland and the Isle of Man. I knew this bit anyway, but I didn’t know that Ol’ Flat Top (as no-one calls it here) and Snowdon were exactly the same height.

For the record, Table Mountain isn’t even the highest peak in the Western Cape, let alone South Africa. Those records go to Seweweekspoortpiek (2,325m/7,628ft) in the Klein-Swartberg and Mafedi (3,451m/11,322ft) in the Drakensberg.

And for another record – and just because it’s a number that has stuck with me since I visited it in 1986 – Mafadi is just 10ft short of being the same height as the highest railway station in Europe: Jungfraujoch sits at 11,332ft. Aside from its altitude, one of the things I will always remember about going there was running along the train platform despite several warnings not to, and becoming very short of oxygen, very quickly.

Something I should probably keep in mind when I pop up Mafedi on my next visit to KZN*.

 

* Presented solely as a nice conclusion to a simple blog post. I have no plans to climb this extremely remote peak.