How Volunteers Saved England’s Most Popular Bouldering Area
- Matthieu Amaré
- 7 hours ago
- 7 min read
At Stanage, the busiest bouldering area in the United Kingdom, years of heavy traffic have slowly worn away the ground beneath the boulders. In June 2026, 40 volunteers set out to repair the damage—with eight tons of gravel and plenty of questions about what comes next.
Rob Greenwood opens Strava and selects “Trail run in Derbyshire.” He hits start. He’s ready.
But what follows looks nothing like a trail run. Instead of trekking poles, Rob is carrying a 55-pound bag of gravel. On this June morning in 2026, the UK Climbing brand manager is standing below Stanage Edge in the Peak District, in north-central England. Around him, roughly 40 volunteers are finishing their coffee. Their goal for the day is simple, at least on paper: haul 300 bags containing nearly eight tons of crushed sandstone up to the boulders at Stanage Plantation, the country’s most popular bouldering area. They have come to repair damage caused by years of heavy climbing traffic.
As soon as his watch starts recording, Rob sets off with his wheelbarrow up a trail with an 8 percent grade. “Zone two! Let’s go!” He is only half joking. Above him, the problem is real—and it has been building for years. Beneath Stanage Plantation’s most iconic boulders, repeated foot traffic first compressed the vegetation, then destroyed the roots holding the soil in place. Once those roots disappeared, rain began washing away the topsoil and then the layers beneath it. Gradually, it carved out scars that can be hard to notice unless you know what to look for. In some places, the ground has lost as much as two feet of depth over 30 years, or roughly three-quarters of an inch annually. For boulderers, the landings—the areas where climbers fall—have become worse. But the larger problem is environmental: every inch of lost soil represents years of natural development that cannot be restored in a single season.
That day, three organizations came together at Stanage: British outdoor brand Rab, the British Mountaineering Council, or BMC, the national body for climbing and mountaineering, and the Peak District National Park Foundation.
Together, they had organized the largest restoration project ever attempted at Stanage Plantation. They had one day to move 300 55-pound bags, containing nearly eight tons of gravel in all.
Loved to Death
Jade Harrison, Rab’s communications coordinator, spent the first five months of the year putting the project together. For the past five years, Rab—whose roots are in nearby Sheffield—has quietly supported the Peak District National Park Foundation. The company typically contributes £5,000 a year to general restoration projects. This year was different. Rab doubled its contribution to £10,000, and its employees did more than follow the project through Excel spreadsheets. They put on gloves and joined the work. “I remember we had the first meeting here at our head office, probably around January, where all three organizations came together and we sort of divvied up the jobs of who needed to do what,” Harrison says from Sheffield. “Ours was very much from a funding and communications perspective. The Peak District National Park Foundation organized it from a logistical perspective, and the British Mountaineering Council was heavily involved from a conservation point of view.”
“I would say that we have definitely added to the erosion of Stanage Plantation over the years, that is for sure, so it’s pretty nice just to try and give something back”
Tim Fish, Product Manager at Rab
The preparation took five months, in part because the organizers needed approval from Natural England, the government agency responsible for protecting the country’s natural environment. The agency imposed a strict limit: no more than 40 participants, all drawn from the three partner organizations, to avoid putting even more pressure on the site. Tim Fish, Rab’s product director, has climbed at Stanage for more than 30 years. That morning, he was among the first to pick up a bag. “I would say that we have definitely added to the erosion of Stanage Plantation over the years, that is for sure,” he tells Vertige Media. “So it’s pretty nice just to try and give something back.”
Jon Fullwood was there too. The BMC’s access and conservation officer has been climbing at Stanage for 35 years. A few days after the project, during a video call with Vertige Media, he holds an old guidebook photo from the 1990s up to his computer screen. Beneath one of the Plantation’s best-known boulders, the ground is covered in vegetation. It almost looks like a meadow. “When you’re there all the time, the process is so incremental that you don’t see it on a day-to-day level,” he says. “But when you look back at old videos or look back in a book that you bought a while ago, you can really see the difference.” Today, the same spot has lost nearly a foot of soil. The meadow is gone. Stanage has suffered so much because it is, quite simply, one of the most popular climbing areas in the country.
Stanage Edge is a three-mile stretch of sculpted sandstone in the Peak District, between Sheffield, Manchester, and Leeds. It has more than 2,400 climbs, some of which have been logged nearly 12,000 times by the climbing community. Roughly half a million people visit every year. They come for the distinctive rock, the evening light, and the sandstone cracks that helped shape British climbing. Stanage’s climbing history began in the 1890s, when the first climbers started venturing onto the rock—often in secret, and sometimes by bribing gamekeepers. The land was privately owned and reserved for hunting by the local aristocracy.
For decades, access was a constant battle. In 1932, the Mass Trespass of Kinder Scout, a protest for public access held about nine miles away at the highest point in the Peak District, became a defining moment in England’s campaign for the right to enter the countryside.
Today, Stanage is freely accessible. Anyone can walk or climb there. That is a political victory. It is also part of the reason the area is now under so much pressure.
“I think Stanage is the most popular crag in the country,” Fullwood says. “That means it gets the most people, the most use, and the most erosion. Over the years, these fantastic bouldering locations have just become victims of their own success. It’s a real target. People come from far and wide.”
And 2,389 Calories Later
The day began with coffee. Roisin Joyce, director of the Peak District National Park Foundation, gave a welcome speech, followed by Tim Fish and BMC CEO Paul Ratcliffe.
Then it was time to get to work. The group looked at the 300 bags of crushed Peak District sandstone—the same material that erosion had carried away. The goal was to make the repairs blend into the landscape. “This material is sourced in the Peak District, so it’s essentially exactly the same as the material that eroded away,” Fullwood says. “It’s sand, small rocks, and grit dust. We’re filling in some of the lost ground with crushed grit—basically replacing it with what’s been lost.” A week earlier, Fullwood and Tom, a national park ranger, had prepared the site by digging a few discreet drainage channels. These would allow water to flow beneath the new fill rather than washing it away again. On the day itself, all the volunteers had to do was carry and compact the gravel.
Adam remembers that “all.” Rab’s content coordinator also remembers the laughter that broke out during the lunch break. “By lunchtime, everyone stopped for coffee and cake,” he says. “It was like, ‘How much more?’ To be fair, we’d only done about a pallet and a half by then. And I think there were 22 delivered in total.” One optimistic volunteer had planned to go for a bike ride afterward. Another had planned a hike. By the end of the day, everyone went straight home, exhausted. Rob Greenwood checked his watch. When he stopped recording, the numbers came in: 6.1 miles, 2,457 feet of elevation gain, and 2,389 calories burned.
“I do see a lot of people—especially among the younger generation—who are very conscientious and mindful of the environment in a way that I’m not entirely sure my generation was, I think the main difference is there are just a hell of a lot more of them.”
Jon Fullwood, Access and Preservation Officer at the BMC
A Fresh Start
From his office, Fullwood points out that this was not the first restoration project at Stanage. A similar effort was organized about 20 years ago through local climbing forums. “It was certainly, in terms of scale and publicity, the biggest we’d done,” he says. “But it was also part of a sort of continuum, if you like. Some similar work was done about 20 years ago. It was as much as anything to test how it would work, whether it would work, what the results would look like, and how it would stand up to the weather.” Other projects are already being discussed, including some in Wales. The bigger question—the one Fullwood has been asking for years—is how climbers behave. Don’t drag crash pads across vegetation. Don’t trample the fragile boundary between bare soil and plant life, where erosion continues to spread. Climb on less crowded boulders. Stay off wet rock, when sandstone holds are more likely to break. “I do see a lot of people—especially among the younger generation—who are very conscientious and mindful of the environment in a way that I’m not entirely sure my generation was,” Fullwood says. “I think the main difference is there are just a hell of a lot more of them.”
Climbing has drawn in entire generations, fueled by the growth of gyms, the Olympic Games, and social media. Most of these new climbers never learned outdoor practices through the informal, person-to-person traditions of the crag. Passing that knowledge along is also the community’s responsibility. Ten years from now, Fullwood hopes to return to the boulders at Stanage Plantation and see that the soil is holding. He hopes the grass will be growing back. “Well, I genuinely think—I hope, and I think—that they will look a lot better than they did in January this year,” he says. “Had we not done anything, they would look ten years worse as well. It would be ten years more erosion. So I think we genuinely set the clock back.”
