Powerful symbols chiselled into a shepherd's shelter
by Guardian Staff from on (#25F0E)
Stanage, Derbyshire On a bleak night, with a folk memory of wolves and belief in evil spirits, who wouldn't need protection?
The long flowing line of Stanage Edge is, for rock climbers, one of the world's great crags, segmented, like a gritstone worm, into various buttresses and features, each of them named, each providing many different routes to the top, each of those - and there are hundreds - also named.
I am at a buttress at the crag's southern end known, paradoxically, as Apparent North, near a short tough climb called Hamper's Hang. I am shrinking inside my jacket against a dismal wet day. I thought I knew this place, having been here as a climber scores of times, but my understanding of it has just been turned on its head.
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