3D technology helps Gwen, 93, to climb again
WHEN Gwen Moffat completed her last mountain climb in 2014, it was an impressive achievement. She had, after all, just passed her 90th birthday.
Now Britain’s first female mountain guide is to revisit her climbing days from the comfort of her home, in a BBC programme exploring her pioneering career.
Moffat, 93, will discuss her unconventional life in the Radio 3 documentary, Give Me Space Below My Feet, to be broadcast in the autumn. The programme will use binaural technology, which gives a 3D experience when played through headphones.
Two climbers, one of them Helen Mort, the poet, took recording equipment to Langdale in the Lake District to capture sounds including driving rain on the rock face and the clank of metal climbing gear.
Moffat has yet to hear the soundtrack. “I look forward to being surprised,” she said from her home in Cumbria.
She recalled climbing in the Dolomites when she could hear the sound of cowbells 2,000ft below: “Sunshine and bells and the rasp of the rope on rock – bliss. It will be fascinating to see how radio works it.”
Moffat took up climbing in 1945 when she left her post as a driver in the Army and went to live rough in Wales and Cornwall. “I met a climber and I deserted,” she said. “The man was good enough but the mountains were the grand passion.”
Her last rock climb was in the 1990s but she did not give up mountaineering until three years ago.
“I think of them more as home than I do a stone structure,” she said. Not that she has embraced the sedentary lifestyle: this week she could be found “scrambling” along Hadrian’s Wall.