Silver expedition - July 2024
Students met with their assessor at St Pancras and travelled up on the train to Edale (Peak District). Camping about 200m from the railway station isn’t always the best option, as trains pass by all night. Nor was that sense of vulnerability helped when one of them discovered that a rat, mouse, or squirrel had gnawed through the tent walls to get at the food they had in a tent pocket.
Day 1 was a tough one, straight out of camp and up the clough onto Kinder Scout. Kinder is famous for 2 things, the mass trespass that took place in 1932 and famously for the bogs and pools that cover the upper landscape. Our students followed many others in getting confused and finding pathways that didn’t really exist. Thankfully, they were located and managed to make it to the campsite.
Day 2 was damp. It rained overnight, so everything was wet. Navigating towards Castleton was made more difficult by having to cross over or under the railway 3 times in the morning.
Arriving at the top of Man they lunched looking out over the Vale towards Castleton and its distinctive chimney at the cement works.
That night we camped by Casteton cement where the noise from the factory acts as a white noise, low level humming like a diesel train waiting to leave, which clearly helped everyone sleep well even when another group of students decided to use their pots and pans as a drum kit.
