Pennine Lines w/c 19 February 2024
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.
Pennine Lines w/c 9 October 2023
In fact we are part of nature, and hence why being outside, climbing or whatever you do, is so fundamentally important. Even just being at a crag 10 minutes drive from the suburbs, with an ice cream van parked in the layby and tied up bags of dog muck hanging from the gates, it’s still fundamentally a different world. Even if the place has been intensively sheep farmed, or mismanaged for grouse shooting or whatever, it’s still better for us than the urban world. The wind blows, the weather changes. We’re not calling the shots out here.