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 …
Author archives: Richard Cole
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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Return to the New Forest and Portsmouth Dockyard: How the Past Shapes Who We Become
I hadn’t been back to the New Forest in years. I’d come with my son for the weekend before his work experience placement started, but there was another reason for returning. This was a landscape where important things had happened to me, and where people who had once been crucial to my life had left …
Liverpool and Port Sunlight: A Family Weekend of History, Ships and Industry
Our recent trip to Liverpool was one of those family trips where the individual parts ended up fitting together rather better than I had expected. On paper, it was a couple of nights in a hostel, some museums, a day trip to Port Sunlight and a few walks around the docks. In practice, it became …
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Cycle Camping the Eastern Moors: Our 11th Annual Cycle Camping Adventure
This year, we finally made it happen though it nearly didn’t. That ill-fated weekend that was scheduled for our annual cycling trip had to be postponed as my son was ill. So my daughter and I salvaged something by heading to Rowsley for a gravel ride and ice cream, but the tradition was too important …
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The Capricorn in Galloway, 1998: Where My Mountain Marathon Story Began
What if a single weekend could quietly reshape your entire relationship with the mountains? For me, that weekend came in the summer of 1998. I was 20, a university student with a love for scrambling, mountains and maps. I thought I was just going for a run in the hills. I had no idea I …
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