Freedom to experience

I have been living in Sheffield for a little over a year now. I moved here from Cambridge where I started to climb at the infamous Kelsey Kerridge climbing wall against a backdrop of aerobics, and then step aerobics. The aerobics class moved on to state of the art facilities upstairs, the wall stayed the same, just quieter.

My introduction to climbing was with Long Road Sixth Form College trips to the peak district under the watchful eyes of Andy Simpson and Sean Rouse, mixed in with family holidays to Wales and lunch times spent at Long Road bridge until our principal found out and banned it.

10 years later there is again a climbing ban, albeit this time for more serious reasons. We are having a bit of a crisis here in the UK, our mountains are closed, in fact pretty much all of the countryside is closed due to a virus known as foot and mouth. This virus is harmless to humans, but infects livestock which are then culled and burned in their thousands.

The reaction to this has been somewhat mixed. Two camps have developed, camp 1 maintain that unless told otherwise climbing should continue as normal at sites not specifically banned, and camp 2 who cry lets look long term and sit this out. Initially I was with camp 1, unless the BMC or countryside wardens tell me not to I am free to do as I wish, therefore I can go climbing. Wrong. We cannot have freedom without responsibility, if we wait until we are told we cannot do something our freedom has gone, if however we choose not to go into the countryside we have exercised and maintained our rights to freedom.

Mountain activities thrive on the freedom to experience mountains however we want, I had never thought that this freedom could be taken away. The pursuit of these experiences may be selfish and little understood but they are real and worth holding onto.