wild and windswept…
Well that's how I liked to think of myself. No. it was the moors, the Dark Peak. Kinder Scout. There is no other upland fell quite like Kinder Scout. Bleak, barren, unforgiving. This is the place where people go but never return, where ships go missing, where wind cuts a sharp knife through rock and peat.
There is sky above Kinder Scout. More sky than Norfolk. From the crystal blue skies of winter, the air so dry it could crack to the forbidding storm clouds brooding and gathering, spilling darkness before them. It is a wilderness. It is a remote place. And I must have walked every little part of it.
This was the gift of my parents. Walking. The open air. Countryside. And I was utterly at home in this place.
I remember sitting on top of the Woolpacks, a rocky outcrop seared by the wind into fabulous shapes. A low mist screamed through the peat gullies and between low-lying rocks. It was like flying across clouds. That night I dreamt. I dreamt about rock and sky, mist and wind and water-cut valleys. When morning I awoke I was on fire. By some trick of the night the magic of Kinder Scout had burnt its way into my soul and nothing would quench the longing to return.
And return I did. Two days later. But the fire could not be extinguished. It still burns. It was then I realized how much I loved landscapes.
I suppose it was inevitable that I would take up rock climbing. There is nothing that focuses the mind more than a climbing move: everything comes down to the feel of the rock, it's coolness or its dampness, its roughness and the way in which it works with hand and foot or not. The cares of the day are left far behind; all that matters is that next move, the balance the poise and elegance with which it can be executed. Some of my happiest days have been spent on the Eastern Edges with the afternoon sun on my back, climbing Froggat and Curbar, or Stanedge. After a day's climb there is nothing better than to sit atop the outcrops and look down across the Derwent Valley to the villages nestling far below; tranquil in the evening glow.
