The skyline of Boston is dominated by one thing. St Boltoph's church, more commonly known as The Stump. The tower standing at 266 feet 6 inches high is the highest parish church in the whole country. It's a symbol of our little market town that is known the world over.
It's quite an easy challenge, climb the tower, don't fall off and make it back down again in one piece. I'd tried a few times to do this but for a variety of reasons, adverse weather conditions, a lack of people to oversee the climbing and other assorted things meant that this challenge had been put off a couple of times.
No more though, I can safely say it was a lot easier to climb than St Paul's, there are only 209 steps and it's very enclosed, I found it a lot easier to get up there even with my aversion to heights, as I had no idea how high up I was.
After a brief chat with a lovely old woman whose name I didn't get and the promise of a high five when I returned. An old wooden door was opened for me leading to a very tight spiral staircase. A quick ascent making liberal use of the rope to help pull myself up and I found myself on the balcony looking over the horizon, down the River Haven and out into the coast. It was here that I got a severe fright from a landing pigeon, that took one look at the slightly out of breath human in front of him and took off again. After reading the wikipedia article and taking a few photo's to prove that I did the challenge I was thinking of heading down, but got interrupted by another climber who informed me he climbed in an acceptable 2 mins 37 seconds. We chatted briefly and I gleamed that he did this climb on a weekly basis because he loved the view from the top, which I have to admit is spectacular.
A quicker descent, you always go down these things quicker than you got up them don't you? And after checking in with the woman who gave me the promised high five I left The Stump feeling that little bit proud of myself.
Why did I want to do this? Basically to quote those brave explorers who conquered Everest, because it's there. It's always been there for me. It's a symbol of Boston and to try and get me over my fear of heights, which I think is coming along nicely. So there we have it, challenge number 7 in the bag and onto the next one.
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