A run which will surely go down in the anals as a “thank f… we survived it!” It started off inauspiciously by pissing down with the sort of rain that gets into every orifice, the path down Doctors Gate was a small fast flowing river, no sign of drought on Bleaklow. At some point we turned right into a clough and then proceeded to scale an “Extreme” cliff, which certainly set the bowels moving. Penny has cause to remember this for some time as she froze on the smallest of slippery ledges with nothing but black void above and below (Quote: “I signed up to do fell running not bloody rock climbing!”) The next point was a pond, ‘nough said and then up the edge of Dowstone Clough with the sound of a raging torrent that would have swept all before it had we attempted to cross it, well below. Some daft chough (Tom Westgate) decided that Bleaklow Head would be a good place to visit and so we did and it wasn’t, but amazingly we did find it in the black void. By this time it was agreed by all but Tom that we had had enough fun and so set off in a southerly direction in the freezing cold, black void. It has to be noted that Messrs Westgate and Holmes, after suggesting that we follow their lead in the void, disappeared and abandoned the rest of the party to their fate. The Safety Officer (had he been available) would have been beside himself with rage at this gross neglect and blatant abandonment of standard procedure but most of us were too knackered to care just wanting to get back to the cars in any direction. So after talking Maurice out of going back north again, we set off south and, praise be, found the path. An interesting “run” and one which was quite nice when it ended!
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