JUNE 2023 · ADVENTURE

Peak District Rock climbing

The Roaches and Windgather Rocks, Peak District

The Roaches is a gritstone escarpment above the Staffordshire Moorlands, running north-south along a ridge above the valley. The approach goes through mixed woodland — birch, oak, the path tracking upward through trees before the rock starts appearing above the canopy. Then the escarpment proper: massive weathered formations scattered across the hillside, each one irregular, each one different in grain and texture from the next.

Gritstone is rough in a specific way. It grips, but it also abrades. The holds are large and often positive, the rock surface itself doing the work your friction has to do on other types. The Peak Climbing School introduced it systematically: how to set up a top rope anchor, how to read the line, how to trust a hold that looks wrong from below and is fine from it.

Group hiking through wooded forest path in the Peak District — Approach through birch and oak before the rock

— The approach

The view from Roaches Hall sign: the crag dropping to a valley panorama behind it, the valley wide and green below. The rock formations are irregular enough that every route feels like a different problem. The texture of the grit close up is almost abstract — pitted, worn in places to a smoothness that belies the age of the stone, rough elsewhere where it hasn't been touched by hands.

The grit took some skin off my hands, which felt appropriate.
The Roaches and Windgather Rocks — June 2023

— Gritstone

Windgather the following day. Smaller crag, different character. More continuous wall, fewer features. The same rope, the same instruction, the same question of whether the hold holds.