Lords Rake Faces Obliteration...

If you've been following the Lord Rake soap opera on OM, you'll know that Guy Newbold has been popping up the rake every few weeks and checking out the situation, unfortunately it's even worse than we thought.

At the end of the last episode, a crumbling pillar of rock was poised halfway up the rake threatening to do a Dirty Den on anyone unfortunate enough to be in its path at the moment it decided to go meet its rubbly cohorts.

Well in last night's episode, things got distinctly worse. The pillar's still propping up the bar complete with a bit more rubble, but there's much worse to come. After moving up past the pillar, Guy realised that the detached rock itself is a relatively minor problem.

In his words, the wall it's leaning against 'is slowly detaching itself from the surrounding rock and will at some stage over the course of the next few years collapse into the rake. The top of the rock wall is slipping away from the fell and a crack has developed which is shown below and is about 1 foot wide .

'This slippage crack is complete along the walls length and only visible from just above the West wall traverse path looking back towards to area where the leaning block is situated.'

Guy estimates that approximately 1000 tons of rock is just waiting to slip sinuously into the rake and obliterate everything in its path. Obviously this means Lords Rake is one to avoid and presumably there's a good chance it'll cease to exist as we know it over the next couple of years.

For more information including photos of the Rake and of the one-foot wide slippage crack, see Guy's web site at www.felltreks.co.uk