Exploring and learning while out on outdoor adventures.
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 …
Continue reading “Liverpool and Port Sunlight: A Family Weekend of History, Ships and Industry”
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 …
Continue reading “Cycle Camping the Eastern Moors: Our 11th Annual Cycle Camping Adventure”
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 …
Continue reading “The Capricorn in Galloway, 1998: Where My Mountain Marathon Story Began”
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 …
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 …
Continue reading “My First Sport Climbing Weekend at Portland, 1998”
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 …
Continue reading “Drawing Weather Charts from the Shipping Forecast in 1996”
On Friday 15 May 1998, I began my Single Pitch Award training. But that three day course didn’t happen in isolation. A few weeks earlier, I’d helped lead a school expedition to Knoydart. The weekend before the course, I’d travelled to Derbyshire to lead climbs at Harborough Rocks. The weekend after, I was attempting the …
Continue reading “Single Pitch Award Training in 1998: Becoming a Climbing Instructor”
So much for my training and preparation. On the Friday night before attempting the Welsh 3000s, I had gone out drinking again. When Tim arrived a couple of hours earlier than I expected, I was still packing. I threw the rest of the kit I needed into my rucksack, loaded it into his Toyota van …
Continue reading “Welsh 3000s Challenge: My First Attempt in May 1998”
It was mid-May 1998. I was nineteen and still getting used to the idea that, having left school, I could travel independently. There was still a lingering feeling that I ought to ask permission before heading to the railway station with a bag and disappearing for the weekend. A few weeks earlier, I had returned …
Continue reading “Learning to Lead at Harborough Rocks, Derbyshire, in 1998”
In 1998, I travelled to Tremadog for the Warwick University Mountaineering Club dinner meet. It became a weekend of first lead climbs, club elections and a performance of Wonderwall that I was very pleased to finish. More importantly, it marked the moment when I moved from being a relatively new member of the club to …
Continue reading “Warwick University Mountaineering Club Dinner Meet 1998”