Been there, close to that...

[bunn]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article6947512.ece

Charlotte Shaw, one of a team of teenage walkers, fell into a stream on Dartmoor and died. It sounds like she was a fairly fit and competent child, but that her companions were not, and that she was forced into a position of taking responsibility for them because they weren't permitted to break off the training when they got cold and wet.

I really didn't think they still did stuff like this. In the early 80's I vividly remember teachers at my rather poor quality North Devon school (different one, similar idea tho) doing exactly the same thing on my Duke of Edinburgh's hike. Exmoor, not Dartmoor, but I can honestly say I have never been so wet and cold while clothed.

I hope they at least had modern equipment: we were told we must wear the supplied heavy and uncomfortable poorly fitted Navy-issue boots and carry terrible heavy absorbent rucksacks which were a real torment to carry when completely soaked, and they rubbed, and rubbed... I was at least not too horribly unfit, but a friend I was walking with was very unfit and rather overweight and I can still feel the stress now of the thought running round and round the back of my brain 'what do we do if she collapses out here in the pouring rain...?'. Struggling on, mile after mile, soaked through, freezing and exhausted. No mobile phones then of course....

Allowing children to take risks if they want to do so is something I can see as a positive: forcing unwilling children to march across rough, dangerous country riven with flash floods and bogs in pouring rain for no particular reason is something I find difficult to register as anything other than abusive. It certainly put me off the idea of ever going hiking as a hobby, if that was the idea.

Poor Charlotte, and poor Yasmin. :-(

Comments

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

I feel very lucky. My school allowed us to use youth hostels for our D of E expeditions, so I spent both of mine wandering along sunlit footpaths in the Cotswolds and the Wye Valley. (I only did bronze and silver; IIRC, gold was much stricter about it being proper camping in rugged wild places.)

One of my most uncomfortable memories, though, was of a preparatory night hike done as a big group in the Forest of Dean. The weather was awful, and I was suprised at how scary I found the unending dark forest and how depressing a walk was when you couldn't see a thing. I remember meeting up with the minibus, and a teacher telling us that a ferry had just sunk and drowned hundreds, which felt like the final touch of misery to the whole experience. The weather that night must have been very memorably bad locally, since just the other week my Dad apparently mentioned to a friend that I'd gone on a night hike the night the Herald of Free Enterprise sank, and even 20 years on, this friend remembered the weather and was amazed we'd been allowed out.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

Like so many things other things at my school, it was something that *could* have been exciting and fun, but was transformed by the way it was implemented into unpleasant drudgery.

I only did the Bronze and Silver hikes because they needed someone else to make up the party, I didn't do the other bits to actually get the badge, could never see the point.

[kargicq.livejournal.com]

YOUTH HOSTELS!?!?!?! Now that's not in the spirit of it at all. :-) N.