Where eagles dare
Terry Baker
printed on Giclée Epson Semi-Gloss
Photograph taken on Baslow Edge, the Peak District National Park, UK. The Eagle Stone is a 6 metre high block of solid gritstone standing in proud isolation on the heather covered moorland known as Eaglestone Flat high above the village of Baslow. The village sits below one of the ‘Edges’ for which this region is rightly well known, especially to rock climbers. The Edges are in fact majestic escarpments rising up from the basin of carboniferous limestone that forms the White Peak. The limestone, being much less resistant to weathering than gritstone, has, over countless millennia, eroded away, thereby exposing the much tougher cliff-like face of the sandstone grit. The name of the stone itself, it has been surmised, comes from the Celtic god Aigle, who had a habit of hurling rocks around the countryside for some reason. There is an old tradition that the young men of Baslow had to prove their manliness and fitness for marriage by attempting to scale the stone, a daunting task as the stone has many overhangs. It is the idea of these local young ‘eagles’ daring to conquer the stone that gave the image its title! Or is that a climb too far?
