Pennine Lines w/c 19 February 2024
|| Warm & Wet || Still rubbish ||
Ebola || Climber: John Coefield
|| Focus On... ||
Anston Access
Well, that was another week of dismal weather to coincide with the school half term holidays, in Sheffield at least, brilliant. I hope the parents and kids in Derbyshire have it a bit better this coming week but it’s not looking hopeful! Anyway, forgetting about the meteorological doom and gloom let’s go with some good news.
It turns out the BMC have managed to agree some access guidelines for Anston Stones, which I imagine will come as something of a surprise to most of us who follow the access situation there closely. They have updated the sexily named Regional Access Database with the following:
“The bouldering at Anston Stones Wood all takes place on land owned by Anston Parish Council. To preserve the good relationship that climbers have with the Parish Council, The British Mountaineering Council have agreed the following guidelines which we ask all climbers to adhere to:
- Stick to existing footpaths and firm ground, avoid trampling on vegetation
- Pick up any litter you come across
- Stay off the railway line
- Climb only on areas that have already been developed (i.e. Woody’s Rock, the Wave area, Rocky Valley, Hidden Wall, Apprentice Wall, Dukes Wall, Through Post, and Frodo buttress.)
In addition to the above, avoid topping out where possible.”
This is something of a very welcome development, although to be fair working with instead of against climbers has been on the Anston Stones management plan for a few years so it's great to see this now trickling through into reality. Hats off to those at the BMC and the Anston Parish Council for working to make this happen. Also it’s interesting that the apparent SSSI issue at Anston - which was always the main reason cited by the small but vocal we-just-don’t-want-climbers-here community (and it IS....etc) hasn’t transpired to be a deal breaker. Anston remains an SSSI - as in fact tons of the busiest crags in the Peak are. So it just goes to show just saying ‘SSSI’ in protest of access isn’t the access conversation-ender it’s often made out to be. What is insane though is that we have to acknowledge how the access prospects here could so easily have been torpedoed by the one or two individuals who trespassed on the railway a couple of years back. These bright sparks also advertised themselves doing it online, which ended up with a fence being built taking a couple of decent buttresses out of action. It’s frightening just how much damage a few idiots can cause for the rest of us, and serves as a reminder that we've all got our part to play in making sure the new access agreement is a winner for all concerned.
So, if everyone’s been climbing here all the time anyway, then it’s just business as usual - why does gaining official access recognition matter, you may well ask? I suppose it matters precisely BECAUSE it’s business as usual; i.e. it demonstrates that it should be an easy sell. For land management bodies it’s then not really a leap into the unknown. It’s been said time and time again by access campaigners that you’re usually better off pushing for official access from a position of sustained and trouble free usage already (railway issue notwithstanding). As the saying goes it's easier to ask for forgiveness then for permission.
I’m not of course suggesting that any and all access restrictions should be ignored, in fact far from it; playing access with a straight bat should be the norm pretty much everywhere. However, at places like Anston which have open access for the public, and no legitimate coherent case against climbing, it doesn’t make much sense to just walk away from these venues, and arguably we’d not be sitting here with agreed access today if we’d all just avoided Anston for the last twenty years.
Screaming Dream || Climber: Dave Norton
The access agreement at Anston also matters in the wider picture of access on the eastern Magnesian Limestone in general. These are not crags where, culturally speaking, landowners/managers are used to climbers being there. It’s not like being in the Peak, where if you discover a new boulder in some woods or at the unfashionable end of some crag or other it’s often no big deal, or at least the obvious exceptions tend to be based on very specific circumstances. You’re never more than half a mile from a major crag, most places are used to reasonably open access, the CROW act, and more importantly people have encountered climbers a lot and know we’re not some nefarious vandals hell bent on bringing landowner liability cases to court when a crimp snaps on us. Gradually the cultural landscape of outdoor use on the eastern crags will shift, and the Anston access agreement is part of it. It will hopefully serve to move things in the right direction if and when the opportunity to get the nod for recognised access at other venues - Roche Abbey being the obvious one that springs to mind.
So what’s in it for land managers? Well, for a start it means they can actually formalise what is and isn’t legit, and where people should park, access routes and this sort of thing, instead of it being just a loose self-policed set of written or unwritten rules which not everyone might know about. Landowners can’t say “you can’t climb” and then in the next breath say “climbers must only park here”. But with recognised access as a landowner you can make it clear you don’t want climbing at night, or you only want a certain access path used, etc etc. Hence with Anston we have the set of guidelines above, so we all know where we stand, and that info is the written down in topos, guides, apps etc, so there’s never any excuse. Job’s a good ‘un.
Having climbers around Anston is of course also a win in terms of our presence reducing antisocial behaviour from kids out drinking under the crags and leaving litter and lighting fires and all that. But more generally an access agreement also means landowners can put their energies into more productive directions, having just rid themselves of a set of antagonists and replaced them with a set of potential allies. Bit of wall repair, litter picks, graffiti removal, conservation work? There’s plenty of examples of proactive land managers mobilising climbers to help with these sorts of things for the broader good of the area - and yet this is almost impossible to imagine without agreed access. I would suggest places like Anston in particular, with close road access and all the litter that goes with it, could really benefit from this kind of collaboration.
In light of all this, it goes to show what an admirable job the BMC access folk have done here in getting the access agreement over the line, and how much value there is in having a representative body for climbers who can take on this sort of stuff. There’s obviously a lot of bad vibes going around at the minute about the organisation what with the dissatisfaction over comp management side of things, governance debacles of recent years and the financial situation ongoing. I’m no BMC apologist by any means, BUT the access side of things has always been a huge strength both in terms of the staff and clout centrally, and also all the unpaid access volunteers up and down the country, the real grassroots beating heart of it all. Fingers crossed none of the current upheaval jeopardises that.
|| Recently Through the lens ||
Admittedly slim pickings, but it's nice to see Millstone from a new perspective.
|| Fresh Prints ||
A couple of new ones in the Print Shop this week, from just near The Boss at Yarncliffe.
