Sometimes the best days out are the ones where you don’t really have a grand objective. You just spot an opportunity, head out and see where the day takes you. This particular Sunday started with yoga and a cooked breakfast before we locked up the house and walked down to Chesterfield to catch the 9am …
Monthly archives: September 2026
How I Became a Winter Mountaineer: Ten Years of Scottish Winter Mountaineering
When people ask how I got into winter mountaineering, the honest answer isn’t about climbing harder routes or collecting impressive grades. It was about repeated exposure, poor weather, failed objectives, and slowly learning to make decisions that kept people safe. This is the story of how that happened, traced through the Scottish mountains between 1998 …
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Climbing on Lundy: Devil’s Slide, Scrabble and Formula One
Tuesday 28th of September to Friday 31st of September I sometimes think there are two kinds of British climber: those who have climbed on Lundy, and those who have not. Before you go, the island has an almost mythical quality. It sits somewhere out in the Bristol Channel, appearing in guidebooks and climbing stories as …
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Leading Scrambles with Warwick University: Mountain Days, Minibuses and the Scramble of Doom
The Scramble of Doom If I had to choose one surviving piece of paper to represent that whole period of my life, it might be the Warwick Mountain Walking Club poster for the Week 6 Trip – Patterdale, Lake District. At first glance, it is just another student club handout: a university logo at the …
From SPA Training to Assessment: A Climbing Log, May 1998 to May 1999
Introduction This is the story of the twelve months between completing my Single Pitch Award (SPA) training in May 1998 and returning for the assessment in May 1999. It draws on my climbing logs, supervision records, diaries and contemporary accounts written by friends. Together they preserve a surprisingly detailed record: not just of what I …
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South West Scotland with Kids: Castles, Coast and Great Cumbrae
We set out for Scotland with little more of a plan than to get to the coast and visit castles. I had been looking at castles, coastline and islands: perhaps Bute, perhaps Cumbrae, maybe Culzean, perhaps somewhere farther west. South-west Scotland seemed to offer an appealing concentration of all three without requiring the long haul …
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