Saturday. Gloriously sunny weather. Climbing on lovely rough gritstone. No polish. No midges. No crowds. Cake. And, just to cap it all, we did a new route as well.

Yes, we were in the 21st-century Peak District, and no, I wasn’t dreaming.

We were at the Rollick Stones, a shapely little gritstone edge stuck in the side of a hill just outside Glossop. Martin and I were the only team on the crag, primarily there for the purposes of guidebook checking (”bright clothes and big butties, please”) but taking time to not so much savour as revel in gritstone as it used to be.

I bet Froggatt was heaving. Not to mention sweaty, midge-ridden and polished to death. Meanwhile, we had an entire crag to ourselves, and did I mention that we did a new route?

Nothing esoteric, just a pair of twin cracks that no-one seemed to have bothered to climb yet, which, once Martin had walked round the top and booted a couple of loose bits off the top-out, yielded a nice VDiff with a traditional stick-your-foot-in-your-ear-and-stand-up awkward finish.

We celebrated with cake.

We also struggled with, swore at and fell off some clear candidates for an upgrade, did a little cleaning and gardening, and found a gloriously photogenic leaning tower which I soloed, silhouetted on the skyline, smiling happily as the jugs just kept coming.

So, in short, Saturday was glorious. And then, on Sunday, we went to Crowden Great Quarry, which provided something of a contrast. The routes were steep, knackering, longer than usual for gritstone and needed a little care in places, adventure climbing boiled down and condensed into a single pitch, climbers launching themselves skywards to escape the depths of the quarry bottom. Routes were started with a cautious undercurrent of excitement, the eventual outcome still in doubt, and finished with a sense of having done something a little out of the ordinary. Once again, traditional crowded polished grit it wasn’t.

To avoid the polish and sweaty hordes, all we had to do was go a very little off the beaten track, look at a different book and accept a slightly longer walk-in and the exciting possibility of a bit of an adventure. And it really was worth it.

Try it sometime. You might like it. I may even bring cake.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 29th, 2008 at 3:05 pm and is filed under Places, Routes what I did. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.