See and hear the customers views!

Rohan tackle the Via Ferrata + Zip



Listen to Joan's entertaining & humerous
ascent of Honister's Via Ferrata
BBC Radio Cumbria

Watch before they leap!!!!

Via Ferrata on YouTube courtesy of Trail Magazine!

VIA FERRATA
"THE MOVIE! 2007"

To view images and comments of the route up Via Ferrata
by David Hall click here!
by Andrew Leaney click here!
by Roger Hiley click here & here!



Check out this super audio slideshow by Kevin Rushby as he climbs Englands 1st Via Ferrata in The Lake District - a precarious path miners had to negotiate every day,
just to get to work at the very top of this amazing mountain - Click here! (3 mins, 45 seconds)

Article from The Sunday Times Travel Newspaper 20th January 2008
The Winter Wall
The mission: Climb Cumbria's Via Ferrata
I make a pact with God: let me live through this and I will never ever complain about my morning commute again.
I am currently on - just on - what must be Britain's most perilous route to work: 2,000ft up a sheer cliff, clinging to a wet rock on a "path" with an 80-degree gradient. The bit of slate on which my foot was resting has just broken off and shattered on the valley floor far beneath, with a noise that sounds a bit like someone saying, "That could be you next..."
All in a day's work, though, for the Victorian miners who manned the slate mine here on the Honister Pass, not far from Keswick, in the Lake District. Except, of course, that they weren't double-clipped onto a fail-safe metal cable like a big scaredy-baby - which I, obviously, am.
It's called a Via Ferrata, and it's England's first. They've had them in the Dolomites since the first world war, when a network of these "iron ways" was hammered into the hillsides to faciliate troop movements.
Now, they are used by tourists and amateur mountaineers who want the thrill of climbing without the trill of actually falling to probable death.
The technique couldn't be simpler: you clip yourself onto the cable, then walk, scramble or climb your way upwards. The knowledge that it would be quite impossible to fall more than a foot doesn't altogether neutralise the natural adrenaline rush of getting so close to the edge.
At Honister, for your 19.50, you get your harness, an utterly unnecessary helmet and a guide. If you're lucky enough to land Michael, you'll also get an agreeably Cumbriacentric history lesson. The graphite mine, also here, used to have armed guards because the stuff was more valuable, pound for pound, than gold, he tells us.
The Via Ferrata takes you up through the slate mine itself, the ghost town that was the miner's village, in about 45 pretty-much-anyone-can-do-it minutes. A further 20-minutes walk gets you to the summit of Fleetwith Pike and exhilarating views.
By Ed Grenby