Billy Mottershead

I walked around Watergrove Reservoir on a gloomy wet and windy day today. I passed a bench, beside which was a vase of almost fresh flowers. This photograph shows the memorial placque on the bench.

Billy Mottershead was on his way to do some climbing, almost exactly ten years ago today, when a vehicle hit the car in which he was a passenger on moorland at Blackstone Edge. The car ploughed off the road and hit a fence post that crashed through the windscreen, leaving him with severe head injuries.

Yorkshire Air Ambulance paramedics arrived quickly to airlift him to Leeds General Infirmary but during surgery it became clear he would not survive. He never regained consciousness.

Billy had been travelling from his home at Littleborough to climb at Halifax. He was a first-year student in outdoor studies at St Martin's College, Ambleside, Cumbria,

Billy's family were determined good would come from his death. Their insistence that his organs were used for transplant helped more than 30 people.