UR 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 – 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.
