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The club party who’d been on Laqroun in 1997 went off to try and came back without having found any chink in its armour, so I was astonished later to read somewhere that goats were grazed on the summit. Not that that was entirely encouraging. I used to think that where goats could go I could follow, but not any more, not after seeing where they climbed to on Atlas crags. However, back at Tamga on the road below in autumn 1999 some of us wandered off to at least circumambulate the Cathedral and, if lucky, see how the goats and, presumably, their owners made their way up to the top.

On the ascent of the Cathedral

We received a shock on returning to where we’d camped previously. The site had been wiped out by a flash flood, leaving a tidemark two metres up the tree trunks, and the road bridge, of substantial iron girders, had been swept away and beached downstream. There are times when nature sends a shiver down the spine.

Four of us paddled across the river and went up to a piste, which we partly used, then bushwhacked for a hot hour on the south flank. (The piste actually zigzagged up and then went off over a shoulder, not to the tower’s tizi.) Nothing worked, so we shifted to the other down-valley side. There were breaks onto lower terraces, but no sign of use. We went right round back to the up-valley side and, tucked in a corner, was a ‘Berber ladder’ of logs and stones ramping up to a steep bit and then onto the start of easy but sensational ledges. After I’d had a recce, two of us went on. And on. The exposure was sensational.