Space Below My Feet

"Moffatt is a complete legend. She’s a British mountaineer who had her 100th birthday recently. She was the first ever female mountain guide in the UK. She deserted the army in 1945 when she met a bunch of climbers and became a climbing bum. Space Below my Feet is basically an account of that—of leaving the army, getting into climbing and discovering mountains. So you get all that passion and that love for the rocks, for that way of life—you know, sleeping in barns, washing in lakes. That sense of going into poverty in the name of doing the thing, because that’s the thing that makes sense. Then she writes about climbing across the UK and gaining the skills to do that in the Alps as well. You get a real window on what the culture was like then. You get a brilliant sense of a mountain journey as a way of life. Absolutely. It’s everything. It’s what you do, it’s what you think about, what you talk about. It shapes your whole body and your whole psychology. The more you do, the more it becomes a part of you. And then that’s just who you are. I wrote a memoir called Time on Rock which was published in 2022. It’s a nature writing book about rock-climbing and connection to nature through the mountains. Every chapter centres on a different place and a different geology. It’s a lot about what it’s like to climb there, and how those particular rocks—whether it’s gritstone or granite or limestone—shapes your experience as a climber, makes you move differently. It’s a lot about physical movement sequences and patterns as well as how it shapes the people and the place and the landscape. Yes, that’s central to what I wanted to show, which is what I felt was missing from a lot of the more conquest-driven narratives. You know: we went there, we climbed this route, it was hard, we got to the top. I’m more interested in what you learn about the world through rock climbing, through this intimate physical relationship with the mountain created through putting yourself there and being in a heightened sensory state. Yes. Only getting to pick five mountaineering books is cruel. If you asked me on a different day, I could give another set of five. But I want to mention Feeding the Rat by Al Alvarez, about his friend Mo Anthoine. There are a lot of climbing memoirs, so it is quite cool to get one that’s a biography of a brilliant climber, and Alvarez is trying to get into that psychology: what drives the climber and why do they do it?"