Last updated 22:12, Tuesday, 25 March 2008

HESKET Spiders are a climbing club that spin their multi-coloured ropes up the crags of the Lake District, rock climbers one and all.

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Arthur Walby, assistant brewer

Climbing done for the day they repair to the pub, the Old Crown in Hesket Newmarket.

Here they spin their yarns of their epics on the rocks – and while doing this they sometimes taste any new beer the brewery is about to launch on an unsuspecting public.

In these hard times where a shrinking market, a pub smoking ban that has lured drinkers to cut-price offers in supermarkets and spiralling ingredient costs are taking the fizz out of the drinks industry, the continued success of the little brewery adjoining the pub is heartening.

King Spiderman – and a Spiders founder member who formed the club so he would always find a soul mate to tie on his rope – is Arthur Walby, a brewer at Hesket Newmarket Brewery.

He is assistant to head brewer Paul Johnson, who by way of contrast likes to keep his feet firmly on the ground.

He is also answerable to brewery manager Colin Cheyne, pronounced like Cheyne Walk in Chelsea. (Though sadly, Colin says, he is “no relation”.)

“The only living incumbent of the original administration”, Arthur sometimes relieves the stress by going up the wall.

Villagers no longer bat an eyelid when they see him reaching up for the merest handholds on the side of the pub.

Then when he reaches the slates high above the inn sign he climbs back down to the street, only then taking the cigarette he has been smoking from his mouth.

He thanks his spider-like activity for giving him the added perspective “from above”, to help create the beers, and keep them up to standard.

He worked as a brewer (and barman) for Jim Fearnley who ran the Old Crown with his partner Liz Blackwood, when in 1988 he set up the brewery in an adjacent converted barn.

In 1995 Jim and Liz sold the Old Crown and focused on the brewery, retiring in 1999.

A group of local enthusiasts saved the day and founded the Hesket Newmarket Brewery Cooperative to keep alive the concern, a community enterprise run on voluntary and self-governing principles.

These 70 real ale buffs own equal shares in the outfit. They usually opt to receive their dividends in liquid form.

Among  the  core  membership  are the Hesket Spiders, that 50-strong climbing club which Arthur helped found with solicitor Peter Johnston who lives next door to the pub.

“You have to give the rock a chance,” he once said after falling of a crag in Borrowdale to dangle aptly – and perilously – like a spider on a thread above the valley.

The Spiders – who include Sir Chris Bonington, Doug Scott CBE and brewery treasurer Dave Absalom (a chartered accountant whose talents are rather lost in the Spiders as they don’t pay subs) – go up the wall too.

Penrith Climbing Wall is a particular favourite. And they scale Lakeland rock faces like Pillar Rock and Scafell Crag.

And what a diverse crew they are. President is octogenarian Tony Moulam, a doyen of mountaineering, who an unsuspecting Arthur met in the pub and offered to take climbing.

Only then did he find his 80-year-old partner on the rope was a star in the climbing firmament. And it was A J J Moulam of the Alpine Club and Climber’s Club who ended up taking Arthur up the rock face.

Most Spiders live on the doorstep, however. Craggies like Dave Bodecott, a civil engineer who also plays football for Motherby FC; Kate Keohane, a village doctor in Caldbeck who has climbed on Himalayan expeditions. And artist Tessa Kennedy who was once stuck with a rock falling down Shepherds Crag – not that it put her off climbing.

Doug Scott even shinned up a drainpipe to hang the Walby sit-up-and-beg bicycle above the village green.

How did Arthur retrieve it? “I climbed up and untied it with my teeth,” he says. “Remember, I’m a rock climber.”

For a number of years he doubled as brewery drayman, until the day he accidentally bumped into the back of a people carrier in Carlisle.

It transpired the passengers were an armed police response team on call-out.

It was decided in future Arthur should stay put by his beloved mash tun.

Guided tours of the brewery? He is said to give very entertaining trips, including police outings.

Just don’t mention Junction Street, the scene of his embarrassing incident.

“On average we brew 150 gallons a day,” says. That’s an average as some brews are more, some are less. “Four times a week we regularly produce on our normal cycle of nine different kinds of beer.

“There is Great Cockup, Blencathra, Skiddaw, Helvellyn, Haystacks, Doris, Catbells, High Pike and Old Carrock – taking it from the weakest to strongest beers.

“Someone once suggested Boningtons as a name for a new beer. I called at Sir Chris’s house to ask if was agreeable to lending his name to such a venture.

“He was tickled pink.

“But the committee thought the name too similar to the Cream of Manchester beer. They chose the name of another boring mountain instead.

“Originally we used to blend whatever we had, say a bit of this and a bit of that to make a new beer.

“So the original High Pike beer used to be an equal mixture of Skiddaw and Carrock.

“And half way between the mountains Skiddaw and Carrock you actually do find High Pike. Appropriate, don’t you think?”

As a past prize-winner at Newcastleton Traditional Music Festival, once chosen as the Bard of the Year, he has noted both brewing and climbing down in his inimitable odes.

The chorus of his Spiders club song (to the Manchester Rambler tune) says it all:

“I’m a bold Hesket Spider, my ambitions are wider and higher than what I can do.”

But what good cheer they have in the process.