The Secret Diary Of A Guide Scribbler…

...By Simon Jacques (35 and a bit...)

Monday: Checking…

The new week and surprise, surprise the pitter-patter of rain auditions at the window, its symphony sounding a perfect day for checking out the Whatstandwell Area, with fellow guide scribe Offwidth. Sometimes you never visit places because no one else you know has ever been there, waxing lyrical to entice the senses. Sometimes because you don’t see them in the magazines, and sometimes, well just sometimes, because they are quarries like these. That’s not to say they are to be ignored, oh no! These holes in the ground aren’t, as some suggest as bad as genital herpes, they do truly deserve a visit as indeed we did on this wet day. Tipping our chins up to the quarry’s lip, great lines soon became evident and much scribbling ensued, as inky tear drops ran down the ledger. On the way back to the car, we spot a dubious video cassette stuffed into a hole in a dry stone wall. Obviously the youngsters of Whatstandwell’s porn sharing drop off…now that got you interested…

Tuesday: Piccies!

This is more like it, the great fireball burning up crisp azure skies …a photo day for sure. With blue & yellow t-shirts on the menu, the order for the day is some smashing Chatsworth Grit at a fine esoteric location. It sounds great doesn’t it? Well not quite... First off the farmer is bringing in his cows on the approach lane. Then the light starts to play a little game with us. As soon as Mr or Mrs model springs on the rock, a cloud shuffties over the sun. As soon as nothing’s happening, it moves on, mocking us… as the rock becomes bathed once more in perfect sunlight. If you have ever taken springtime rock shots in the Peak, you will know exactly what I mean…

Wednesday: Catastrophe…

Access issues plague the day, as a well-known bouldering circuit is no longer open for climbing. Phone calls are made and the mood is sombre after scripts have been prepared and photo’s taken. Still, it brings home the fragile relationship that we sometimes forget exists between ourselves and the environments we inhabit, not to mention the importance of keeping existing access agreements in mind when writing guides. An admonition in what can go wrong has been dealt out and due care must be heeded…

Thursday…Pioneering!

A day of action! A spot of exploration, new problems and getting down and dirty in the greatest woods in the region. For some, Froggatt may conjure up visions of smooth slab lines, soaring arêtes and crunchy cracks, all with a sprinkling of stars. Well them’s for me too, but maybe not in the same parts of Froggatt that you know and love. We are off to the neglected buttresses that lie below the main approach path, the rocks that you pass as you make your way to 3 Pebble Slab, Valkyrie, or maybe a Roman Orgy (yep its in the book!) The greenery of some of the bloc’s is soon overcome by a light brush and quality problems are sent. The dedication of the team operating in these parts to clean and find new lines is admirable, and after extensive searching and some hard graft, the script becomes rich with some truly inspiring lines. My bath at the end of the day is soup like in its consistency; complete with Lichen Shampoo, a sign of a good scrattle in them there woods…happy days…

Friday: Old Hands… New Routes…

I’ve been studying lines, straight ones, bendy ones and ones with a bit of a crick in them. This one’s the former of the former in that it should go, well, straight up! Enlisting the help of a fellow NHS chum on one balmy evening, we tramp down from the Grouse Pub to Tegness to see if it will go. Belay steaks are clipped, worried brows are furrowed, and clipped brows are worried. After a short top rope session, a worried cameraman is shitting his pants… But I fret needlessly as the warm up’s in the Quarry are dispatched easily by Lee who seemed oblivious to the shaley nature of the crag, loose holds, and scary top outs that are literally to die for. Through a lens, his soloing becomes strangely comforting, this is a man who knows this territory and is a perfect choice for the last great line in the Northern Quarry. Which makes it all perfect when he ties on at the bottom of his new route, I doubt he even recognises what he’s about to do. He climbs so fast, whacking in some poor gear, and soon he’s at the top, giving me time for only a couple of good shots, and with only a slight pause for reflection, states a grade of E3 6a. Evening Light was thus born, an unsightly offspring compared to its extended family of handsome siblings over Froggatt way. Yet this child of a honest but unloved crag can proudly hold its head high, just as its creator does each and every day…after all, Lee is 6ft 4!!

Saturday: A Kinder Surprise!

The Alarm goes off at some god awfull time for a Saturday, coffee is necked as pack up’s are hastily assembled. Guidebooks tumble off the bookcase as I try to locate the most recent to Ashop Edge. The 1970’s one, it seems, will have to do. The Grouse accompany me across the bleak moor to the Northern Edge where we hook up with the rest of the Moorland Grit Guide Team, and new routing is the name of the game it seems. All goes to plan and so far so good. Then Kinder starts play the very devil with me, evil green grit, and on the second of a new route, I pull a hold off that explodes onto my forehead, sending me spinning off into the wild moorland air… Stunned but not deterred I don a lid and fight my way back up slippery pinches to sneaky undercuts, and the route is battered to submission.

We move around Ashop edge, suspicious, nervy, a kind of respect growing to its remoteness, its ability to play games, fooling & teasing. Nowhere then more so apt than Jester Cracks to take my next fall down the mountain… just someone, somewhere, in summertime…

Sunday: Research…

Interestingly, I find that the husband of my old Primary School ‘Nit Nurse’ has put together an unabridged history of Baslow; so I gain some fascinating info for Gardoms. The origins of Froggatt elude me, until I find that it’s named after the people who dwelled there whom pertained to look like Frogs! …Must try harder…(see the book I found it eventually…)

Obtain some very rare pictures of quarrying at Tegness and Yarncliffe via a local source, humbling and exciting in the same instance… Oh and did you know that Julian Cope, the famous 80’s rocker has a website called The Modern Antiquarian, which deals with all things ‘Time Team’? Well he does, and a great source of information it is too, for places like Rowtor Rocks and Robin Hoods Stride. Speaking of which, a seriously good book for some historical quotation is E.A Bakers’ tome, Moors, Crags and Caves of the High Peak & Neighbourhood, check it out, they don’t write them like that anymore…

I end the very long week, in my cosy shed, perusing by lamplight some of the influential past guides to Peak Gritstone. Penned by such seminal authors as Byrne, Gregory, Allen and Milburn, these vast mines of information bequeath seams of guidebook gold, which continually encourage, concentrate the mind and force a grounded approach to the next modern working guide to the Peak Grit area. Something we hope you will all enjoy as much as we have in its long, sometimes painful but never dull and always inspiring creation…

From Froggatt to Black Rocks is out now see:

http://www.bmcshop.co.uk/product_info.php?cPath=347&products_id=5932

The soon to be classic Over the Moors guide is due in 2011. Keep watching the shelves…!

Baslow and its Eagle Stone

“Change comes not,

this dread Temple to profane,

Where time by aeons reckons not by years,

Its patient form one crag,

sole stranded, rears…”

William Watson

This quote from a Sonnet by the bard William Watson is what W.A Baker in his book, Moors Crags and Caves of the Peak District (1903), used to describe a trip to the rock known as the Eagle Stone, which sits majestically upon the open moor behind Baslow Edge.

As to whether Watson was indeed filing his nails on his boots while penning this little ditty beneath the lone sentinel, we shall never know, but one would understand Baker revelling in his writers licence, referring to the Eagle as that sole stranded crag.

The mighty Eagle Stone’s name may come from “Egglestone”, meaning Witch Stone or it could be after the Pagan God “Aigle” who used to hurl huge missiles of rock for sport, as they used to do…

In related terms there is also the boulder of the “Aiguille” at Hen Cloud and indeed the “Agglestone” which nestles on a hillock over looking Studland Bay in Dorset, which has its fair share of theories of who threw that massive hulk. Some say it was the Devil, living in a B&B on the Isle of Wight trying to knock over Corfe Castle and missing by some margin…

Whatever the folklore elsewhere, Baslow, and its history, takes us back to the Monolith of The Eagle Stone, where the crags humble beginnings began in the 19^th Century with the stones north-westerly nose being a challenge for the men folk of the local villages whom wanted to marry their beloved.

The local tales pertain to the young fellows, who could not wed their bride until they had shown their fitness and agility by climbing to the top of the stone.

Most probably fell off on purpose and trudged off with smiles on faces down to the local Inn to meet their mates, but many have followed in their footsteps to put up some great test-pieces and foolishly ended up with a ring on their finger…

... 'time by aeons reckons' indeed...

Bole Hill Kids (circa 1989)

“Hundreds & thousands please?”

The cigarette was stuck fast betwixt the ruddy lips of the ice cream lady, as she shuffled over to a stack of grubby tubs, muttering in a slushy Yorkshire drawl, the ash bowing, drooping and ultimately falling into the multi-colured needle thin sugar strands.

The snow had come unseasonally early that year, a half arsed smattering over the crags had lead us to the relative warmth of the Quarry. After a few pitiful attempts, we soon became bored with frigging Redbits, a fierce finger crack in Lawrencefield’s Surprise bays, and so with gear and ropes left in place we made it over to the car park to get some fags from the ever present Ice cream van, ‘Jean’s Creams’.

Oaktree had decided that as I looked the oldest, I therefore would be our best hope. At 14 years of age, that was a backhanded compliment and needing a distraction from climbing so poorly, I reluctantly volunteerd.

“Sorry luv I don’t sell em… but you can av a few o’ me superkings” Jean said, as two of the largest cigarettes ever concieved were prised out of a shoebox sized packet. We orderd a few 99’s and the greasy, lumpy ice creams covered in the garish ticktack sprinkles were passed over.

“Oh and I’ve got an ‘amlet if tha wants it?”

We bode our thanks, I put the cigar into my chalkbag for safekeeping and we shuffled through a light snow carpet over to the quarry lip and launched the ice creams into the pool.

In between sparking up and dive-bombing the ice’s water bound, Smee announced that the fish in the pool would be happy to eat the discarded fayre.

“Fish? In that shitty pool?” exclaimed Oaktree, “S’not bloody Grimsby docks!”

“Aye that’s where thee was last night at thee girlfriends” came back Smee.

Streaks of Ice had taken over Gingerbread slab and yet there was a surprising lack of white stuff on the vertical, so I protested that we should try Great Peter, me being the only one who gave a toss about looking in the faded 1979 guidebook to find a route, Smee now rolling a spliff and Woossy wanting start a fire to get warm and go look for some seaonal shrooms in the unseaonal September snow.

Oaktree agreed to belay me. I told him we would cruse it, “Finger crack. HVS guide says, piece o’ piss, best watch me though”

Locking and torqueing fingers, I quickly shufted up the fine crackline, the wobble block providing the interest before the long crux reach, during which Peter the Great spat me off.

Spitting obcenaties, I had a breather warming numb fingers and soon cranked it out to the larch tree ledge.

Oaktree took an age to second, he always did, and so bored and shivering, I reached into my chalkbag, salvaged the stoogie and proceeded to try and light the bugger, just as wispy snow began to flit around the quarry coupled with that strange silence that accompanies.

Just as I got the Hamlet nicely fired up, it was by now quite chalky, without sound nor warning, the rope began rapidly snaking through my Figure of Eight.

Oaktree soon found his voice and after a comic fumble with lighted match and cigar, I just managed to stop his arse hitting the deck by a gnats fart. A torrent of abuse billowed round the rocky crucible, followed by fits of nefarious laughter from a now well-baked Smee.

As cheap cigar smoke filled the air, I admit I could think of nothing else to ask…

"did you fall off?"