Last updated 01:11, Friday, 15 February 2008

Roped together, veteran climbers Syd and Eileen Clark,of Little Broughton, tell TONY GREENBANK how they pool their skills to defy gravity and death.

Syd Clark with his wife Eileen on the slopes of Fleetwith Pike

The two recent fatalities when walkers fell to their deaths on Striding Edge highlight the dangers of Lake District hills in winter.

Husband-and-wife climbers Syd and Eileen Clark, of Little Broughton, take in the news with that certain look climbers have when hearing someone has been killed on the hills.

Like all seasoned climbers, they are no strangers to tragedy.

They have faced moments when death was a possibility.

And they have lost friends and acquaintances who have died in climbing accidents.

Not only have they been married for 38 years, but during much of that time they have tempted the odds by climbing together as partners on the rope.

Syd, at age of 66, recently climbed Ama Dablam, known as the Matterhorn of the Himalayas – a dorsal fin of snow and ice and rock.

Eileen, who is six years younger, did not climb that peak, but it was the exception. Most times in the hills they climb together.

For nearly two score years – from the red sandstone sea cliffs of St Bees to the granite rock faces of Scafell, Great Gable and Pillar Rock – this couple have partnered each other up the toughest routes.

Syd has even passed the benchmark of completing more than 100 climbs in the Alps, Austria and Dolomites.

Eileen prefers to partner Syd on a challenging climb. “I’d sooner be there involved than not,” she says.

“If I was in some other place I’d worry.”

Getting killed is always on the cards if you climb a great deal, she says. Syd says it is not all down to luck. Being survival-minded plays its part, as does keeping ever-wary.”

Sometimes they argue over safety issues on a cragface.

“Oh, we have had our domestics on the rocks,” says Eileen, with a laugh.

“I know better now than to try to tell Eileen how to do a piece of hard climbing I have just done!” Syd says, and they share a smile. “Eileen leads hard climbs in her own right, and is certainly no ‘belay bunny’ – the kind of climber who is dragged bodily up routes on the rope.”

So conscious are they of danger Eileen would not dream of wearing her wedding ring on a climb.

“You could lose a finger if the ring became wedged in a crack and you fell with all your weight on it,” she says. Such is the stuff of a climbing accident, often unexpected and brutal.

Syd experienced some mixed fortunes, for instance, when he was bed-ridden with flu in 1961.

Ten climbers, including fellow members of the West Cumberland Mountaineering Club (now defunct) were avalanched that same day in Central Gully, Great End. The cornice above this famous snow climb collapsed and thundered down the gully, burying two and injuring three of the climbers.

Some say he was lucky. Syd sees it differently: “I may not have decided to climb that day with my friends anyway.

Conditions were bad, it was thawing and I could well have said, ‘No, not today, thanks’.”

He admits he once came to grief due to his own fault – peeling off a climb in spectacular fashion on Malham Cove, near Skipton.

“I was almost at the top of the cliff and slipped. Perhaps I was a bit too blasé.

I fell, down the full height of the cliff upside down, to be held on the rope by Eileen.”

Like the spider watched by Robert the Bruce, he tried again and this time succeeded: “When I finally reached the top there was this big cheer from all the other climbers on the crag who had been watching.”

It was through another crashing fall by Syd that the couple met.

“It was in Aviemore in the 1960s,” says Eileen. “It was Syd’s first time on ice skates. He lost his balance on the rink and collided into me.”

Was she hurt? No, but she was literally bowled over!

They began going out with each other a year later, then Eileen moved from her home town of Blackpool to Maryport.

Here she moved into the spare bedroom at Syd’s mother’s house where he lived – “separate rooms, of course”.

It was just a step on the way to their eventual marriage in 1970 at Cockermouth Register Office.

As to who proposed, in Eileen’s words: “We simply understood we would get married.

“I don’t remember any formal proposal, say on a rock face or mountain summit.”

Syd worked as an engineer and climbing depended on the leniency of his employers to give him “extended leave”.

This was frequently used up. “I would return to work and find my cards waiting,” he says, and admits to working his way through the small engineering firms of West Cumbria until he retired.

Past presidents both of the Fell and Rock Climbing Club, they admit that making their presidential speeches at the Shap Wells Hotel on separate occasions – and to several hundred diners in the banqueting suite – ranked with the challenge of the hardest climbs.

What got them through was a familiar friend in frightening circumstances. Sheer adrenalin.

Syd’s ancestors would have expected no less. In 1914 his great uncle Douglas Clark played rugby league for England when they beat Australia in the legendary Rorkes Drift test match in Sydney.

The team was reduced to 10 men and Syd’s great uncle insisted on returning to the fray, though injured in several places.

This is why Syd’s name is so-spelled: to remember the heroics of the bulldog breed that day at Sydney Cricket Ground.

Even now, 94 years later, these Cumbrian Clarks are proving a hard act to follow.