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 …
Category archives: Uncategorized
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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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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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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Imperial War Museum Duxford and the Bomber Command Centre: A Weekend Revisiting Aviation History
An unplanned weekend through Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire became a journey through three different kinds of memory: the lives commemorated at the International Bomber Command Centre, a return to RAF Brampton more than twenty years after my parents left and an unexpected encounter with my own aviation history at Duxford. The weekend began, as these things …
My First Sport Climbing Weekend at Portland, 1998
I had recently completed my Single Pitch Award training course through the Mountain Leader Training Board. The first formal stage towards qualifying to lead and supervise groups at outdoor climbing venues. The course had given me a much more systematic understanding of ropes, belaying, anchors and the responsibility involved in looking after other climbers. What …
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Drawing Weather Charts from the Shipping Forecast in 1996
While going through an old folder of mountaineering qualifications and course paperwork, I found a pile of weather charts pushed into the back. They dated from around August 1996, when I was seventeen. At first glance, they look like old maritime charts showing the sea areas around Britain and the North Atlantic. Scattered across them …
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