MOUNTAIN PORTRAIT
No one would make big claims for this White Peak hill – but for Jim Perrin it’s a mini-mountain that inspired a young imagination
OUR EARLIEST JOURNEYS are the ones that cling on most determinedly in our memories.
Thorpe Cloud is only 942 feet high (287m), but it’s diamond-etched into my adolescent recollections. It lies at the foot of Dovedale in the White Peak of Derbyshire.
I first ascended it as a twelve-year-old in the glorious summer of 1959. It would be foolish and misleading for me to make major claims for it.
It’s a tiny hill, albeit a shapely and highly visible one, finely situated above Dovedale’s stepping stones.
When I first saw it, in distant glimpses, the steep loom of it impressed me. It was not so scarred by path erosion in those far-off days.
I’d read of it in my Peakland outdoor bible – Paddy Monkhouse’s On Foot in the Peak – and when I first saw the white spur thrown down from its summit towards those stepping stones across the River Dove, it excited me enormously – a broken white ridge of rock bursting out of the green slope, or so it seemed. It begged to be climbed, in my young imagination.
So in the course of a five-day circuit in the White Peak, during a spring half term holiday, with trepidation I balanced over the stepping stones at its foot, clawed my way past savage sheep (I was a city boy, remember, and they seemed that way to me) that roamed and cropped the greensward of the lower slopes, climbed to the point where pale limestone speared out through the turf, felt and grasped and balanced my way up with the slope falling away precipitously beneath (or so it felt) and applied the precepts of balance climbing gleaned from JEQ Barford’s Penguin paperback on Climbing in Britain that I’d picked up for threepence in an auction at an evening meeting of the Manchester City YHA local group.
I‘d even gone so far as to buy Number Five tricouni nails from Ellis Brigham’s old shop near Ardwick Green, which the cobbler who was my Aunty Elsie’s boyfriend tacked into the welts of my Timpson boots, as Barford advised. They made me feel like a real climber.
A year or two later, when Arthur Williams and Brian Royle took me up the Munich Climb on Tryfan, I found they worked perfectly in hooking behind little flakes on the crux slab and nose. But that was a later stage of development than I’d arrived at for these few days of jaunting, of which the high point was the summit of Thorpe Cloud.
First of all, I have to get there. I put together an itinerary with the help of bus timetables and the old 1:63,360 OS map for ‘Buxton & Matlock’, wag off school at Friday lunchtime (not so easy as you might think since prefects were stationed at the gate), sneak home without my parents seeing me, write them a note, race to London Road station to catch the Buxton train, run up the hill
