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| A panorama across the idyllic peak district landscape from The Roaches |
On the Friday afternoon we headed north to Leicester to spend the weekend with our old friends Linda and Bernard Spies. We immediately set off to the Peak District with the intention of climbing in an area called The Roaches. We camped in a beautiful field below a lovely rocky formation called "Hen Cloud" and set up camp while being molested by the most persistent midges we had ever encountered. Midges in South Africa are annoying - here in the UK the are vicious and bite - hard!!! Soon our faces were covered in mosaics of red midge bites and we cooked and ate while walking in circles to try and keep them off!
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| The walk to the Roaches was made all the quicker by the cloud of midges following us. |
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| Team Spies as we prepare for the first climb of the morning. |
We had brought our climbing kit to the UK with us thinking we'd be on rock a fair bit, but as it turned out we barely encountered rock at all either due to limited transport options or the consistent rain we had experienced. Linda and Bernard are keen climbers and this was to be only their second climbing trip of the year! We made up for it though on the Saturday morning with a number of routes. Climbing in the UK is however quite different to at home. Whereas most climbers in Cape Town would consider themselves sport climbers, i.e. they clip into protection which has been pre-drilled into the rock, in the UK sport climbing is frowned upon and most routes are traditional routes - whereby the lead climber places mechanical protection devices into the wall as he is climbing - and the second climber removes these as he climbs. The protection has lovely names such as cams, hex's, nuts ad friends. We were climbing on Gritstone which is like a combination of the features of sandstone with the texture of granite, and then covered in wet slime and moss for good measure (this is the UK after all). It was really fun climbing and though the walls weren't necessarily high we could link up to three pitches together making for some fun routes.
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| The gritstone was a wonderful refresher course on trad climbing. Very featured rock with lots of protection options at reasonable grades. |
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| Linda and Bernard sometimes let a wookie get between them... |
The UK grading system also took a bit of getting used to. Routes are graded not only on technical difficulty of the moves, but also on the availability of protection, or lack thereof, and also the exposure (to wind, elements, or open space below you). Their grading was termed from Moderate, to Difficult, to Severe, to Very Difficult Hard Severe which apparently is much more difficult than Hard Severe. Geoff wanted to lead, but was clueless as to the actual difficulty of the routes on a South African basis and we established after a few routes that he could climb up to Severe which was probably a grade 16 in South Africa…??? Anyways we had a wonderful weekend of climbing with great old friends in a most idyllic countryside setting.
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| Some of the belay points had amazing veiws! - Bernard |
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| Geoff deftly working loose the moss where he wants protection to go!!! |
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| The stunning Don Whillans Memorial hut set in the 'enchanted forest'. Don Whillans was a top climber in his day and was famous for a number of first ascents. He is however also known by many climbers as the inventor of the Whillans Harness, or "Ball-breaker" as anyone who has ever had the privilege of using it can attest. Harnesses have thankfully come a long way since then! |
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| Beautiful!!! |
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| The belay stances can get lonely at times... |
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| We actually saw this scene...! |
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