Mountain Portrait
Jim Perrin writes in praise of the Peak District’s Stanage High Neb
THE QUOTE IN THE HEART of this page gives some background to the state of affairs which obtained on the
Derbyshire moors prior to the 1932 Mass Trespass. Stanage High Neb’s not the highest of hills, barely exceeding the 1500-foot contour (458m). Some might argue that it’s not a hill at all, being no more than the highest point on what for me is the most appealing and varied of all the millstone grit edges of the Pennines - the four-mile escarpment of Stange Edge. But it’s a huge presence, majestic, brooding, spacious, prominent, and visible for miles around among the Peak’s brown and purple, grey-outcrop-fringed landscapes.
We’re on crossover terrain here between rock climbing and hillwalking territory. High Neb, for all its dubious status as independent summit certainly features on some memorable Pennine walking itineraries, or variations to them. That was how I first encountered it. On a June weekend over 60 years ago my regular walking companion of the time, the Oldham outdoor columnist Len Chadwick, decided that next weekend’s objective for his club, the Kindred Spirits, was to be a version of the 70-mile Colne-Rowsley route that took in as one of its collection of OS pillars the one that stands demurely a little behind the edge at Stanage High Neb. Visitors here even in the early 1960s needed to be a little discreet. Through the early decades of the 20th Century there were clearer threats. Here’s Byne & Sutton again:
“[The keeper] would fetch his gun and his dogs and come charging across the strip of moorland to the base of the rocks... Usually there were enough climbers to allow a defiant gathering on the top of the edge, and a violent argument would ensue with flaming temper and ridiculous threats on the one side, and a stubborn desire to climb on the other. Such occasions would usually end with the keeper pleading that this job was his livelihood, and eventually the climbers would clear off to other rocks.”
I like the magnanimity from our side implicit in that last sentence. Land-tenure politics aside, the high belvedere of which High Neb is the centrepiece is a ravishing, scintillating excursion. It was along this walk that I first registered the climbing activity here: how much of it there was; of what apparent quality; the relaxed and humorous demeanour of the participants in those days, the barracking between them, which contrasted so starkly with its modern acquisitive rather than play-orientated counterpart, or with the driven quality and exhausting nature of Len’s weekend objectives. Also, with Len there was little time to look around and observe. I recall my excitement on this long-gone June morning at seeing ring ouzels scudding across the slope beneath Mississippi
Buttress; also at watching the kestrel that hung on the wind above the ‘popular end’ (the one nearest the road). Here's Gerard Manley Hopkins:
“High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding / Rebuffed the big wind.”
The first time I walked here I was at a point of divergence – away from a fascinating, educative association with the man who had not only overseen my induction into what Ewan McColl called “the hard moorland way” and into what became a decades-long obsession with steep rock and the culture of that sport.
Len Chadwick – “that tramp”, as my father tersely called him, but he was far more than that – had also given me my first sense of social justice, inequalities of opportunity, internationalist and Chartist beliefs. I’m still grateful to him for his teaching and his anti-materialist example, but I was too young for the physical rigour of his lessons.
Enough of autobiography. I had many more teachers in years to come through the association with climbing. I even managed to add new climbs of my own on this great edge, the best of them on a fierce buttress where the existing routes were all by heroes of mine: Joe Brown, Don Whillans, Barry Webb, Colin Kirkus. But what I need to tell you as walkers is of the best ways to reach High Neb.
It’s probably the simplest ascent (excepting the rock-climbs on its fine, prominent buttress) of any in this series. Approaching it from Moscar Lodge on the A57 road to Sheffield will bring you to it in a few minutes; the track up from the plantation beneath, where long-eared owls nest, is even shorter; or you can arrive by way of the long succession of edges leading south – Burbage, Froggatt, Curbar, Baslow. Whichever way you choose, sit on top of High
Neb Buttress in the sunset facing west, or amidst the abandoned millstones stacked beneath, watch Bleaklow being absorbed into pastel-blue shadows; and if you stay long enough and climatic conditions are right, perhaps you’ll see the mysterious flicker of the Northern Lights over this wide landscape, peerless of its kind.
MAP: Ordnance Survey 1:50,000 Landranger 110 Sheffield & Huddersfield FURTHER READING: Patrick Monkhouse, On Foot in The Peak (1934); Eric Byne & Geoff Sutton, High Peak (1966); Gordon Stainforth, The Peak (1998) FACILITIES: The national park campsite at High Lees above Hathersage is popular and convenient. Hathersage has plenty of cafés, pubs, equipment shops and other such allure. And Sheffield, with its excellent curry houses along the Ecclesall Road, is only just over the hill.
“The keepering of the edges during this period [between the two world wars] was strict and there were many clashes. Stanage High Neb was only accessible during bad weather in winter… In the Robin Hood area the bane of the climbers was a red-haired keeper who lived at a nearby cottage. His bloodcurdling threats roared from the lane below generally had little effect. ” Byne & Sutton, High Peak (1966)