One winter afternoon, browsing in a second-hand bookshop, I found a book called Cambridge Nightclimbers, by ‘Hederatus’. (Hedera is the Latin for ivy, probably the world’s most talented climber). Inside the cover was a red ink stamp: ‘Cambridgeshire Libraries: WITHDRAWN FROM STOCK’ it declared, intriguingly. I flicked through the book. It was part-memoir, part-guidebook, written under a pseudonym in 1970 by a student who had spent his years at the university scaling the city’s buildings – sacred and profane – and evading the porters.
‘Buildering’ he and his friends called their sport, and they were very good at it indeed. The Fitzwilliam Museum had fallen to them, as had King’s College Porter’s Lodge (‘It is essential to climb the clock-face up the right-hand side . . .’) and even, most impressively, the twin towers of King’s College Chapel (‘Tradition, height, beauty, severity all combine to make it the goal of everyone’s ambition . . .’). The lady who sold me the book said it had been withdrawn from circulation in libraries because it was a danger to public health.
Each night the following week I dressed in black, eased on my climbing slippers and went out alone, or with my friend Simon, pulling myself up by Gothic bosses, lodging my toes in spandrels, clutching at trefoils – each one of whose upper curves fitted the palm of a hand exactly – and shaking masonry grit from my hair when I got home . . .
Robert Macfarlane on Hederatus’ Cambridge Nightclimbers (Issue 23)
