SAVAGE Arena was the title of mountaineer Joe Tasker’s last book, written before he disappeared on Everest in 1982 and published posthumously. “In retrospect,” wrote a critic, “it reads like an obituary.”

It’s also the name of an exhibition of his life and legacy opened last week at Preston Park Museum in Eaglescliffe, where codgers’ admission is just £1.50 and – unlike Tasker’s vertiginous challenges – may not be supposed steep at all.

One visitor carried a bulging rucksack. Perhaps it was his sandwiches, perhaps he supposed Eaglescliffe the foothills.

The exhibition also offers insights into life at Ushaw College, the Roman Catholic seminary near Durham where Tasker studied for seven years in the 1960s (and where he was known as Josh).

“Ushaw was a very peculiar environment, given that in those days it essentially locked us up for 40+ weeks a year, including Christmas Day and Easter Day,” writes John Busby, a contemporary.

“Resilience and self-survival were no doubt key skills we needed to acquire at a very early age.”

Second of a good Catholic family of ten, Tasker was brought up at Port Clarence – north bank of the Tees – and at Billingham, climbed lamp posts and the gates of the Transporter Bridge, went to Ushaw at 13.

Other contemporaries recall a boy who was always cold – “four blankets on his bed, even in summer” – who lacked coordination and who hated team games. Made to play football, he remained firmly at right back, his only role to talk to the goalkeeper.

It was only when Fr Tony Barker, the maths master – wasn’t he once parish priest at Barnard Castle? – introduced climbing at the quarry out the back that young Joe really began to look differently at higher things.

Though the quarry was just 20ft high and 30ft across, the seminarian had found his real vocation.

He left the college when he was 20, worked for a short time as a binman, studied sociology at Manchester University and became one of the country’s best known climbers – particularly drawn by Everest, K2 and Kangchengjunga, the world’s three highest peaks.

The exhibition also includes a poem written by his mum, Betty, after he and colleague Pete Boardman disappeared, long presumed lost on Everest’s North-East Ridge, just days after his 34th birthday.

When the Lord walked upon the earth,

He climbed the mountains, too.

Did you see him there, my Joe,

Or did he there seek you?

Savage Arena runs at Preston Park (10am-4pm) until June 24. Until April 14 there’s also a delightful Easter egg exhibition – or eggs-hibition as irresistibly they call it. It’s a delightful place.

Whatever else its claim to sporting prowess, Ushaw College may best be remembered among its students for a seven-a-side game called cat, described as a cross between rounders and baseball and dating back to 18th century French monasteries. “A brilliant game if you had good hand-eye co-ordination,” Fr Jim O’Keefe once told the Echo. Joe Tasker, bless him, mustn’t have been much good at that one, either.

So what of Alan Hinkes OBE, the only Brit to have climbed all 14 peaks over 8,000 metres and ever upwardly mobile?

Educated at Northallerton Grammar School, now near Richmond, the 63-year-old appears to have spent a quiet Easter.

His Twitter account covers everything from Easter lambs to snow in Swaledale, even a link to a Led Zeppelin concert in Denmark in 1969.

Perhaps it’s simply what Alan calls chilling. Over Easter 2018 it really wouldn’t have been difficult.

So what’s a self-supporting sports columnist to do over so bleak, so egregious, an Easter?

Plans A-D having been waterlogged, we turn last Saturday to Plan W – which in this case stands for West Auckland.

The X1 bus stops at Sainsbury’s in Tindale Crescent, about a mile-and-a-half from the ground. Within memory, the walk would have passed six pubs and Millie’s little sweet shop. Now there are no pubs, six fast food takeaways – three of them fish and chip shops– and a tanning lounge and nail bar.

On the sort of day that would mark nadir even in November, West are playing Sunderland RCA, whose football secretary Colin Wilson is growing accustomed to the rain.

He’s just back from holiday in New Zealand, where the trip included a day at the first Test. They arrived a little late, missed the only 17 balls to be bowled.

“We waited for four hours drinking beer and eating cheese and biscuits,” Colin recalls. “When finally they called it off, we went to a bar, drank beer and ate cheese and biscuits.”

They’d booked the tickets six months previously. “The forecast was quite good at the time,” he says. “You never can trust the weather men.”

Stuart Laundy, who works for the Teesdale Mercury and plays Darlington and District League cricket for Barningham, is also there.

The wind strengthens, the rain squalls assiduously. “Just three weeks to the season,” he says. .

A chap called Mike Bayly is taking time out from his work as an IT man to finish a book called One Hundred Football Grounds To See Before You Die. Like a kid with a school dinner, he saved the best till last.

Esh Winning’s ground sits, sylvan and scenic, in the little-discovered Deerness Valley in west Durham. Strictly – and wholly appropriately – it’s in Waterhouses.

That was the plan for Monday morning, anyway, though the lads at West Auckland had thought the prospects of play pretty remote.

Social media, they reckoned, showed great torrents of water cascading from the fields above – “and that’s just the sheep pee,” someone rather crudely added.

The plan was to plodge up the old mineral line from Stanley Hill Top, the reality that yet another fixture was drowned beneath the deluge.

Esh Winning had been due to play Crook Town, one of the great clubs of non-league football and another whose Easter recreational activity had been confined to egg jarping.

Since as many as five teams could be relegated from the Ebac Northern League at the end of the season, Town are by no means safe. Relegation would be unthinkable, but they’ve a bit of a mountain to climb yet.