Text 1: Thirty kilometres of black ice, by Tom Horsfall

An original contemporary online feature.

On a still February morning on a lake north of Stockholm, I clipped on a pair of long Nordic skates and joined a dozen strangers for what Swedes call tour skating: not circles round a rink, but twenty or thirty kilometres across natural ice, from one shore to another.

Lake ice is not the same everywhere. Currents near inlets and narrows keep it thin, snow can hide weak patches, and a sunny afternoon can soften what was solid at dawn. Our leader, Annika Lindblad, who has guided groups here for fifteen years, strikes the surface ahead with a steel-tipped pole every few strokes. She checks its resistance and thickness, using changes in sound and appearance as reasons to stop and test again.

Everyone carries ice claws round the neck, to drag themselves out if they go through, and a rucksack with a full change of clothes sealed in a waterproof bag, which also works as a float. A throw rope is clipped to Annika’s belt. Nobody skates out of sight of the group.

The noise was new to me: long booming groans that ran across the lake beneath us like whale song. Annika laughed at my face. ‘That is the ice talking. It is normal. On a warm day, it is the silence that worries me.’

The cold works more quietly. Wind across open ice turns minus six into something much worse, and by the last few kilometres a Dutch skater called Pieter had a white patch of frostnip on one cheek. I fell twice, once hard enough to bruise a hip, and I was very glad of the helmet I had nearly left behind.

Text 2: A skater rescued on the canal, by A Correspondent

An original newspaper report written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this newspaper report from 1867, a journalist describes skating by torchlight on a frozen canal in a manufacturing town and an accident that followed.

The frost, which has now held for nine days, has frozen the canal from the gasworks to the top lock, and on Monday evening it was crowded with skaters from the town, many of whom, being at work all day, can skate only after dark. Torches of tarred rope were fixed along the towpath, and their light upon the ice, with the skaters flitting in and out of it, made a curious and pretty scene.

The ice in the open reaches was thick and sound, but opposite the soap works, where warm water from the engine is let into the canal, it lay thin for some yards and could not, by torchlight, be told from the rest. At about nine o’clock a young clerk named Bayliss, racing a friend, shot across this stretch in the darkness, and the ice gave way under him at once.

His friend, very properly, did not follow him but lay flat and shouted for help. A bargeman named Jabez Mottram, whose boat lay frozen in at the wharf, ran up with a ladder from the soap works yard, pushed it out across the ice, and, crawling along it, caught the young man by the collar and drew him out. He had been in the water perhaps three minutes and was so benumbed that he could not stand.

Several persons also suffered heavy falls upon the rough ice in the dark, and a lady broke her wrist. We would warn skaters that no ice is to be trusted where warm water comes into it, and that skating by night doubles every danger.

Using information from both texts, explain briefly what dangers the skaters faced.

You should make it clear which text you are referring to.