John Buchan’s hero Richard Hannay crosses my mind as I reach an impasse while walking along the banks of the Eden to Armathwaite crags. A flight of steps descends into Sandy Bay, created from fine-grained sand churned up from the riverbed each flood. Only, while Buchan’s 39 steps descend to sands between white chalk cliffs in Kent, Armathwaite’s stairs are sandwiched between red sandstone precipices. Also, Hannay’s adversaries were international spies; mine are old age and a dodgy hip.
The steepness of the narrow steps and the lack of a handrail oblige me to face inwards as I head down toward the shore. I have to let my trekking poles dangle from loops attached around my wrists, so my hands can be free to grab the ancient steps as handholds. Gingerly I descend, lowering one boot at a time. Sometimes a Vibram sole meets thin air. Is there a step missing? I can’t always tell. I become cragfast, unable to go up or down.
Across the little amphitheatre three boulderers in snazzy rock shoes, their fingertips white with climbing chalk, are surmounting overhangs and traversing blank-looking walls. They don’t go much higher than 15ft-20ft before heading down again – or even actually baling out, leaping into the sand or on to the shock-absorbing crash mats they have left below. How it all returns! The blissful hours I spent bouldering here in the 1980s, enough to wear away the ridges of my fingerprints.
The Forestry Commission has been doing its bit to attract more climbers to Armathwaite. Prompted by the British Mountaineering Council, it has recently been felling trees further along the riverbank because their canopies in summer had been obliterating rock buttresses, leaving them damp and slippery after rain. Today, open once more to any available sun, they are snuff dry.
Enough wool-gathering. Tensed leg muscles hurt. “Can you spot me?” I call, climber’s jargon for “Please stand by below!” Arms upraised to buffer any possible fall, the boulderers shepherd me down the remaining steps back to terra firma. A photo shows me looking bashful. Are there 39 steps here too? I lost count.
