The first thing to do is to overcome your instinct.
To top-belay your climbing partner you have to sit exactly on the edge of the rock wall, legs hanging overt, looking directly down.
You would probably prefer to sit some way back, with a metre or two of the limestone outcrop in front of you, glittering in the sun, fissured and smeared with lichen. Some might prefer to be back among the heather on the moor, the edge no more than an idea on the far side of the rock line.
Most climbs on the Roaches are no more than 12-15 metres but you have to look right down between your toes and watch your partner’s progress carefully. The wind, sheeting across the open land and right into the back of your neck, is still where she is, down among the tumbled rocks and coiled rope at the face’s feet.
You hold her life in your hands, it takes the form of a rope a centimetre and a half wide, whose surface, a resilient textile, is patterned and shiny as a reptile’s skin. This passes through a belay device. As she climbs you take up the slack through the zig-zag loops of the cold steel belay. As you pull, your back hand is up. When the rope is tight, that hand drops, holding the “dead rope” against the metal. This means that if she slips the rope won’t. You’ll hold her until she can get back on the wall.
You are right on the edge, the Roaches abruptly ending precisely where you sit. You are tied to the stone itself. A harness round your hips is bound by hitches and loops to a three-part anchor among the rocks behind you. Each component of the anchor takes part of the load. You are trusting yourself to the rope, the knot, the snugness of the gear in among the rocks.
You’re right at the anchor’s furthest stretch. As you look down, or glance up at the great rolling view towards the sun-white reservoir and beyond, the pull of the harness back towards the land behind is the constant reassurance your instinct craves.
Once, I abseiled off a hospital for charity. The man at the top said, lean back, lean back, yes out over the open space, lean back, lean back, further, further, lean back I said. He got quite testy because it seemed like madness to fling myself into the air like that.
Eventually I did lean back, and terror vanished. The abseil seemed too short in the end. I wanted to go back up and do it again.
Your instinct doesn’t stop nagging at you as you look down at the patterns of shadow, at your partner making her way towards you, calling you now and again to “take” the slack as it arises. Suddenly she’s past your feet, hauling herself onto the top, breathless, bight with satisfaction. She steps away from the very edge, sits with her back against the wind and smiles at you. “Safe”, she says, and now it’s your turn to move back from the edge.
Open Field 