Culture clash

This area has been cordoned off now thankfully, preventing further damage.

Interesting things cultural differences, dodgy ground generally.  However, I’ve no intention of risking a fatwa from the Moonies or the Tufty Club so this column will, in time honoured tradition, eschew any mention of religion.  Thank God for that I hear you say.  No, the cultural difference to which I refer is more parochial, namely the cultural chasm that separates climbers from the rest of the human race.  As I found out the other day at Horseshoe Quarry, we really should be kept away from normal people.

There are many climbers who feel that the only way to help Horseshoe Quarry would be to fill it in, but as we now own such an environmentally sensitive site, we’d best look after it.  It’s one of them paradox thingies you see.  Create an enormous sterile hole in the ground by quarrying, abandon it for a while and mother nature excels herself by overcoming the harsh conditions.  Before you can say bio-diversity, a whole host of rambo-plants have colonised the place and botanists are doing a happy jig.

Which is how I came to be fondling my chain-saw as a crew assembled on the floor of the quarry.  Climbers, heavily outnumbered by volunteers from Friends of the Peak District and Peak Park Rangers, huddled in a group, discussing where they’d been, what they’d done, who they’d seen, the usual climber chat.  We were marshalled by a feisty rangeress who took one look at my chopper and turned a whiter shade of pale.  “We don’t usually allow anyone using power tools near volunteers.”  She was obviously convinced I was a mass murderer on day-release and could start slicing and dicing at the drop of a hat.

Thankfully, the climbers didn’t seem in the least bit concerned.  In our increasingly risk-averse society, climbers are happily oblivious to the welter of red tape and risk-assessment that constrain everyone else – if we want to kill or maim ourselves, we’re going to go right ahead and do it.  However, in deference to her concerns, we wandered off to a distant corner of the quarry where we could happily wreak havoc without endangering anyone.  I’m not suggesting that climbers are intrinsically better equipped to deal with dangerous situations, but we do seem to have a healthier attitude to risk than the average citizen for whom proceeding along the highway in anything other than a poorly disguised tank is tantamount to suicide.  Perhaps role models such as Mick Fowler, Andy Cave and Nick Bullock do us no harm.  Then again…….

Thankfully, we’re not alone.  There’s a manic seam of risk-taking running through most outdoor sports and mountain biking, surfing and skateboarding invent ever more ludicrous methods of placing themselves in harm’s way.  However, these are beacons of insanity while wimps rule the world, conkers is an extreme sport and footballers hurl themselves to the floor if someone taps them on the shoulder.

Of course, it’s easy to treat soccer players with the contempt they deserve.  It becomes trickier to mind the cultural gap when it exists between us and another group of outdoor enthusiasts.  I refer to off-roaders, the 4×4 fraternity and trail riders.  I’ve argued in the past that as climbers we need to take responsibility for our actions and accept that we damage the environment, but our actions are little more than a pinprick compared to the actions of the petrol heads.  Where we are the mosquito stinging the arse of the oblivious elephant, they’re the ones with the assault rifle.

On every level, off-roading is a disaster.  Noise pollution, stinking exhaust fumes and destruction of ancient by-ways are just some of the charges we can lay at their door.  The more damage they cause, the more they like it, because the worse a byway gets, the more fun they have.  In a decade they have laid waste to historic roads constructed over centuries on the Ridgeway in the Chilterns, North York’s Moors and the Causeway over Stanage.  What’s more, the vast majority of them simply don’t care.

Would you let this man loose with a chainsaw?

I recently stopped the driver of a 4×4 on the Houndkirk Road on the moors just outside Sheffield.  I explained that due to torrential rain, it was in a pretty parlous state and would he, and it was inevitably a he, consider not driving across.  He looked at me as though I was mad and trundled off to destroy a track that dates back to 1758.  Trail riders now use Houndkirk at speeds that were never envisaged by those who built it for pack-horses.  The legalities of the situation are complicated and, to my mind, utterly irrelvant.  This is a question of personal responsibility, the increasingly unfashionable idea that your actions have consequences.

I’m not suggesting for one minute that climbers, mountain bikers and surfers are whiter than white, but bodies like Singletraction, Surfers Against Sewage and the BMC all testify that when push comes to shove, the outdoor community will put its own house in order.  The driver welded to the seat of a trusty Land Rover Discovery simply doesn’t care about the countryside he so  happily trashs.  Now, where’s my chainsaw?