The long flowing line of Stanage Edge is, for rock climbers, one of the world’s great crags, segmented, like a gritstone worm, into various buttresses and features, each of them named, each providing many different routes to the top, each of those – and there are hundreds – also named.

I am at a buttress at the crag’s southern end known, paradoxically, as Apparent North, near a short tough climb called Hamper’s Hang. I am shrinking inside my jacket against a dismal wet day. I thought I knew this place, having been here as a climber scores of times, but my understanding of it has just been turned on its head.

With me is Bill Gordon, for more than 30 years warden of this part of Stanage, which is still, for the time being at least, in public ownership. Gordon’s profound relationship with this place, and his quicksilver mind, have had imaginative consequences. He is, for example, an expert on ring ouzel dialects.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Stanage Edge millstones, Peak District. Photograph: Chris Hepburn/Getty Images

Now he is tracing his finger along some letters cut into the gritstone nearby that I have never noticed before. One is an M, formed by two inverted Vs, a symbol termed apotropaic, meaning to ward off evil, which can be read as “Virgin of virgins” or Mary.

In a large flat rock buried in the ground, Gordon points out post holes, carved to allow the construction of a wood-framed wall against the overhanging rock to complete a half-formed natural shelter.

At what would have been the back of this shelter I can see that in the deeper recesses the rock has been blackened by wood smoke. It was most likely used by shepherds several hundred years ago, but the age of these symbols is open to question. The inverted VV symbol was commonly used between 1550 and 1750, long before roads were good, or Sheffield, just over the hill, was a city.

There is graffiti nearby from 1766 that postdates this, but beyond that the imagination is left to fill the gaps. Marooned up here on a bleak night, close by the fire, with a folk memory of wolves and a firm belief in evil spirits, who wouldn’t need protection?



