Vivienne Crow survives the perils of the Hanging Stone
The way Brian took us, we just kept coming to these sheer drops with vertical rock faces at our feet, and then we ended up practically breaking our ankles in a pile of boulders. He didn’t have a clue what he was doing!” My ex-colleague Alan’s recollection of descending Base Brown’s Hanging Stone ridge with a mutual friend rang in my ears as I set off from Borrowdale. It made me a little nervous but I had a couple of things in my favour. Alan and Brian – the names have been changed to protect the guilty – had used the ridge as a descent route from Great Gable; I was going up it so, in theory
at least, I’d spot any potential difficulties well before I reached them. Also, I’d done a bit of research and knew to watch out for a couple of key landmarks, namely the Hanging Stone itself and the Fallen Stone.
Setting off on a sultry summer afternoon, the initial climb up Sourmilk Gill couldn’t have been more different to when I’d last passed this way about 15 years earlier. Back then, in the depths of winter, the rocks beside the treeshrouded gill had been coated in ice, turning an easy scramble into something requiring considerably more care. In summer, the only problem was the salty sweat stinging my eyes.
As the gradient eased and the path entered the hanging valley of Gillercomb, I spotted my guideposts – there was no mistaking the Hanging Stone, a boulder poised precariously on the lip of the crag; and, resting close to the base of the rock face, the Fallen Stone.
The latter was surrounded by a jumble of rocks, some undoubtedly its offspring, born both of its fall from above and of its weathering over the intervening years. I picked my way over to it and then higher still, onto a briefly vertiginous trail edging between the crag and the bowl of debris below. A clamber up steep ground, almost entirely on grass – but partly on my knees – led me on to Base Brown’s north-east ridge, just above the Hanging Stone. From here, it was easy going all the way to the summit; I’d bypassed Alan and Brian’s horrors.
I dawdled on the rest of the walk, drinking in the evening light, stopping every few minutes to take pictures of the Scafell range from yet another angle. Great End, in particular, seemed to be posing for the camera, flexing its bulging muscles and looking down on the solitary walker. Gable Crag, seen across the luscious green of Gillercomb Head: such majesty! Then the hazy Galloway ridges across the silvery Solway, looking almost like a mythical, faraway land, but full of real hill-walking promise. ‘Joyful’ always seems a rather simplistic, almost childish adjective to use, and yet it’s the word that best describes how I felt. And, in a world full of complexities and confusion and contradictions, I welcomed that innocent emotion with open arms.