New safety rules

[alwaysinjured]

This is a good point. Look at the handful of fatalities in the history of fellrunning and it's notable how many of the victims were off the race route when they met their demise. (think of Ted Pepper, John Rix, Bob English, Judith Taylor, and now Brian Bellfield)

In almost all cases you are better off being on the race route where you are massively more likely to receive early assistance, though I realise of you have inadvertently gone off-course the advice is not much use to you.

What of the welsh 1991 one (forget name) mentioned by Wheeze? - was that off route too?

Was Brian the only one believed to have gone off route deliberately?

If that was true, he would perhaps have done better to reverse sail, not just in order to use the good trod that descends to the valley between sail and ard crags: but also because in back tracking the route he would likely have seen or met , some other runner or marshall to say that he was intending to find his own way down.

I doubt very much you could formulate that as advice " to backtrack and tell someone" because of the wide variety of situations and the presumption that you know where you are, and you are where you think you are. Sometimes dealing with cold is simply about getting out of the wind on the tops, in the most expedient way.