Richard Hammond wants people to think about their favourite places and about mortality. Photo / Johnny Gios, Unsplash; YouTube, Whats Next
Richard Hammond wants people to think about their favourite places and about mortality. Photo / Johnny Gios, Unsplash; YouTube, Whats Next
When Richard Hammond speaks, all some hear is the sound of an obnoxious V8 engine.
Normally seen burning fossil fuels through exotic destinations and making off-colour jokes, the motoring journalist turns a lot of people off.
However the ex-Top Gear presenter has won admiration recently after speaking about a place that saved his life.
Earlier this week Hammond released a clip via his YouTube channel about what he experienced after a high-speed crash in 2006.
He was put into intensive care with a brain injury after what he called “a particularly flamboyant crash” involving a jet-powered drag racer. Hammond was in a coma for two weeks. He was given little chance of surviving.
It wasn’t the Makadikadi salt flats nor the Bolivian jungle, but a rainy hill in northwest England.
Filming under a tree in England’s Buttermere, in the Lake District, he told viewers that this was a real place.
“The memory of this was of me going up the hill towards this beautiful tree,” he said.
He said that, as he approached the stump, he felt a strong sensation of being told off “like being a naughty teenager”. Then the dream took a turn and he felt himself returning back downhill. His health improved and he did not die.
It was only after he recovered from that coma that his wife, Mindy, told him that she had been shouting for him to come back.
The broadcaster and ambassador for brain charity The Children’s Trust, says he suffered a brain injury to his frontal lobe in the accident.
Presenter Richard Hammond recently made a video dedicated to Buttermere, his favourite place. Photo / YouTube, What Next
He was asked to revisit the place 16 years later, by the BBC’s PM programme.
“It was about how much I loved the place and about encouraging people to share places they were connected to,” he says.
Brain injuries and mortality are heavy subjects, which more people should discuss, he says. It’s a lot easier to think about the places we’d think of in difficult situations or that give us reasons to live.
“My brain took the chance to conjure up my absolute favourite place in the world, my favourite activity. Which is to go for a nice simple walk… up a hill in the Lake District.”
He told the programme that he wanted his ashes scattered at the tree.
He hoped it would encourage more conversations in families, he told PM.
“The comfort I took from that was knowing that’s what my brain will do, it will conjure up a lovely place for me to go”.
The controversial broadcaster has been best known for inflammatory remarks, prompting official complaints from LGBT campaigners and Mexico’s ambassador to London. However this video appears to have been widely appreciated by its 4.6 million viewers.
This year the New Zealand Mental Health Foundation asked travellers to think about their favourite places and memories, for their Mental Health Awareness Week campaign: “Reconnect - with the people and places that lift you up.”
Buttermere is one of three lakes in the Buttermere Valley in the north-west of the Lake District, according to Visit Cumbria. It was also one of the favourite places of author and guide Alfred Wainwright, whose memorial is in the scenic Church of St James.
