Hadow sets off for new challenge

Pen Hadow runs the Dartmoor-based Polar Travel Company

Polar adventurer Pen Hadow is on his way to Antarctica to start a two-man expedition to raise money for a £7.2m Royal Geographical Society (RGS) projects appeal.

The 41-year-old explorer, who lives in Hexworthy on Dartmoor, became the first person to reach the geographic North Pole unsupported from Canada in May.

Accompanying him on his latest adventure to the geographic South Pole will be 63-year-old Hong Kong-based author and entrepreneur Simon Murray.

Mr Murray, a former Foreign Legionnaire, will be the oldest person ever to tackle the trek.

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The pair's mission is expected to start late this month or in early December, depending on the weather.

The 731-mile (1,170 kilometre) journey from Hercules Inlet, on the edge of the Antarctic continent, to the South Geographic Pole will take 65 days.

He and Mr Hadow, an RGS fellow who runs the Dartmoor-based Polar Travel Company, will be pulling 275lb of food and supplies on sledges.

The money raised will help restore, display in environmentally controlled conditions, and digitally catalogue the RGS archive in transformed buildings in London.

The aim of the RGS project is to provide full public access to its heritage collection for the first time.

The archive contains about 500,000 items its archive, including maps dating back to the 15th Century, journals, pictures, diaries, personal papers and artefacts from some of the most celebrated figures in the history of exploration and geography.