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The Duke of Edinburgh Award scheme was founded in 1956 to inspire young people to achieve many new skills and activities. Today over 300,000 young people undertake the Award of which 30,000 are from disadvantaged backgrounds and it is for these young people we are raising funds - so they too can benefit, as we have, from undertaking the Duke of Edinburgh Award.

Stella who is now a doctor and Vanessa who is a geographer first met undertaking their Silver and Gold Duke of Edinburgh Awards in the 1970s. 

 Whilst undertaking our Awards we were challenged to complete many new activities, we learnt many life skills that we both still use 40 years on and also made life-long friendships.

The Diamond Challenge has been set to celebrate the 60th Anniversary of the founding of the Award. The idea being that individuals should again challenge themselves to their limits and learn a new skill.  Stella and Vanessa decided to do a Challenge together and were soon joined by Alan Hinkes OBE, the world-renowned climber who is the only British person ever to climb all 14 of the 8000m peaks in the World. He kindly offered to set us our Challenge and train us to complete it! He also agreed that undertaking this task would be a Challenge for him and so he too entered into undertaking the Diamond Challenge!

Alan chose not to let us know even the location within Great Britain of our Challenge until a few days before the chosen weekend. He also decided we would have to complete two Challenges, one each day over a weekend - neither of which we would have any knowledge of until the day!

On the evening of Friday 3rd February, Stella and Vanessa set out after work from near London through a torrential rain and sleet storm for the Lake District. On Saturday morning, Alan met us and told us that the Challenge was to ‘free solo climb’ without falling in or getting too wet, up the 1500 foot waterfall of Stickle Ghyll in Langdale. After a great training session on boulders where we learnt new skills to balance and to ensure we understood how to increase our grip on what looked like sheer rock…we started the traverse of the waterfall. The photos below tell the tale but after several hours we were triumphantly at the top, having used our new skills and we had not fallen in or down the waterfall!

Sunday morning dawned and once again we met Alan who told us today’s Challenge involved using the skills learnt yesterday but in a more extreme environment; a disused copper mine near Coniston Water! We arrived in the area and once again received more training expertly given and then we scrambled and climbed over boulders using our new skills, for an hour or so to reach the height of the mines. Alan kindly gave us a practice run in a small mine to get us used to being inside such an environment. He then moved to another mine where after a ten minute walk inside the mine asked if he could look at our torches…Alan having taken them… of course the next Challenge was to walk and climb back in the pitch black…quite a task! Finally, came our visit to the copper mine. We entered wading through knee high freezing water and then using our new skills, traversed and walked though the mine for over a mile, avoiding huge holes that were many tens of metres deep …and then of course we had to retrace our journey to the head of the mine. The photos once again give a good illustration of the Challenge.

We are most grateful to Alan for his expert teaching, his keenness to pass on his knowledge to us and his kindness in saying he is ‘very proud of us both for our bravery, perseverance and fortitude.’ He in turn told us that he is so pleased that he had joined us as it had challenged him to get us to this standard of performance so quickly, so that we had the confidence and skill to undertake the very challenging tasks.

Having completed our own Diamond Challenge and Alan having completed his, we very much hope you will be kind enough to donate to the Duke of Edinburgh Award to give young people the opportunity to start on a journey of life-long experiences and to experience the triumph of undertaking something that at the outset seems totally impossible to master.

Thank you

Stella, Vanessa and Alan