That was something.” But ever since Bob Graham did his celebrated “round” of 42 peaks on 13 June 1932, the most coveted fell-running record has been for the number of peaks scaled inside 24 hours. When we finished at Derwentwater, it was becoming dark, but we saw everything else in a single day’s daylight – a beautiful clear June day it was, only a little bit of of mist early on. He says: “I would have done it in six days, but I had trouble with my feet” – that is, the flesh on both ankles was cut through to the nerve.Asked which single run has given him the most pleasure, he chooses his Lakes, Meres and Waters record run of 1983: “It was one of the most beautiful things I ever did, seeing every drop of water in the Lake District, 27 of them in 19 hours, just over. (In the Nineties, Lake District runners travel to world championships in italy and Switzerland.) He won the classic Mountain Trial, run annually round a different course, 10 times (“It should have been more, but my navigation let me down”). Among his records are his coverage, in 1986 at the age of 50, of all 214 of the summits listed in Alfred Wainwright’s Lake District guides, in seven days, one hour and 25 minutes, clipping half a week off the existing record (it took Wainwright himself 13 years). On impulse, he joined in in his workboots, led for eight miles until he got cramp, and had found what he wanted to do By the time he was 30, he was best on the circuit.

In those days, fell-running was really only a local curiosity; but soon he began the sequence of record-breaking exploits that have helped the sport transcend its seemingly natural limitations. He doesn’t, in a phrase, look after himself, but leaping bogs and crashing down scree requires its own kind of fitness. What he recognises in himself is that he “carries no weight” (at about 6ft and nine-and-a-bit stone, he is indeed “as thin as that”, as an admirer says, holding up a single finger) and that he has “a tremendous amount of power”: a power which is not built up in a gym or fuelled by food or rest, but seems in some slightly disquieting way to generate itself.Joss Naylor first raced in the summer of 1961, when he saw a trial beginning near his father’s farm at Wasdale Head. “I’ll eat owt,” he says, meaning not that he prefers restaurants but that anything will do. In fact nothing will do him most of the working day – just water and a chocolate bar; on big runs, he will take mouthfuls of sweet rubbish, macaroni pudding, trifle, weak tea; and a few cans of stout at night. It certainly helps, on runs of 24 hours or more, to be able to do without sleep, as Joss Naylor’s back forced him to learn to do.

On runs of more than two days, he will take three hours’ sleep a night on his mattress in the back of a van Neither, by the way, is he too careful about his diet. Even after, he was in continual pain, and occasionally in a surgical jacket, until he was about 40: but by then he had become one of the outstanding long-distance athletes – if it is possible to compare fell with Alp or bush or track – in the world.Since this medical history didn’t deter him from endurance racing, it must instead have helped him to withstand its ordinary aches and pains. Arriving at the show, I meant to ask where I could find him, but knew him as soon as I saw him: the tall spare figure in the tracksuit, leaning in, sipping a Mackeson and nodding in conversation but strikingly more alert and intense than those around him, as if on the look-out for something in the field to herd or hurdle.Fell-running projects the ordinary animal urge, to go farther and faster, into territory that obstructs it: where tussocks and peaty holes and sudden stones keep up a constant uneven percussion on the knees and ankle-joints; through pathless tracts of boulders covered with bracken and heather; and up on to sharp rocks that blister and bruise the feet and cramp and shred toes The weather, too, will attack you. Joss Naylor describes running on consecutive days: one in dry mountain heat, “like trying to stand close against a bonfire”, when “there was no sound but the rasping of air in your throat”; the next, of such pummelling horizontal rain that it made of his face a featureless balloon.

A pair of Cumberland wrestlers, in their daft flowery knickers, lock to in a mismatch: the grinning old hand upends the plump teenage apprentice with friendly restraint. Prize sheep, big muttony Herdwicks, their coarse grey fleeces dyed rosy red for the show, are bundled roughly back in the wagon with the losers. And as the farmers disperse from the beer tent, over the wavery PA a little girl sings a song, written by a local teacher, in honour and praise of “our Joss”.And “their Joss” is how they see him; everyone here is pleased to tell you how they know him; proud, too, of his being not quite like them or ourselves, invariably reaching for extra-human terms – a “whippet”, a “cougar”, a “man of steel”, a “bionic shepherd” – to describe him. This happens each year on the second Saturday in October, the last show in the Lakeland calendar, the chilliest, drizzliest and heaviest-drinking. To lay a hound trail, two runners head off in opposite directions, each dragging “a sock full of other socks” soaked in aniseed, to meet somewhere halfway round the course as the owners let their foxhounds off the leash. I found this out, anyway, one autumn afternoon, by trying to take a cab across the Lakes from Kendal station to Wasdale.