Footless Crow

Some winters ago Eric Langmuir, John Disley, John Cleare and I stayed at Ben Alder Cottage, en route for Fort William to Dalwhinnie. This is one of the finest bothies in the Highlands. And Eric, jokingly, warned us that it was haunted. He told us the story of a visit which his sister Marjorie, then a medical student, had made to the cottage with a party from Glasgow University Mountaineering Club. During the evening they heard footsteps outside. They went to the door and looked outside. No one there. And then it happened again. Still no one there. Some months later I told this story to a very eminent Scotsman. A strange look came over his face and he told me the story of his visit to Ben Alder Cottage, before the war, when he was a boy. That story has remained forever in my mind. Recently I persuaded him to tell it again — the most astonishing story I have ever heard. The only fact that is concealed is the name of this eminent Scotsman because he is fed up with having his leg pulled. I can, however, assure readers that this is no leg-pull.

It was in about 1937. A great friend of mine who had walked with me the whole way from Glasgow to Skye in 1930 and with whom I had climbed in the Cuillins, those most delectable of all mountains, told me that he had heard two of the tougher anglers, who fished the more difficult places in the Highlands, talking about the Loch of the Buich Pass. The name entranced us and we wondered where this place was where these marvellous trout could be caught — up to 3/4lb at 2,400ft. Where was this Loch? Tom- my friend- worked in another Department of the Corporation of Glasgow, but in the same building as I did and one day he came up the stairs into the drawing office where I stood as a young apprentice civil engineer and said: "Bob, I've got it. I've been looking at the one inch maps and it's Loch Bhealaich Bheithe — Loch of the Buich Pass in the Gaelic. A mountain pass between Beinn Behoil and Ben Alder. Let's go there".

So we did, in 1938, and we came up on his old motor bike with me on the pillion and we left it at Bridge of Gaur on Loch Rannoch. From there an old stalking track went for, I suppose, six or seven miles across this wild moorland through a dying forest — a stark, white-bleached remnant of an old Scots pine woodland area. The track stopped as though it had been cut by a knife in the moorland and after that only rough moorland for a mile. And we came over this rise. Tom had a little pocket telescope which had been given to him for some occasion. We lay there on the ridge and looked at the hut we had been told about or had heard about: Ben Alder Cottage, this old Butt'n Ben.

No smoke came from the chimney, no curtains were in the window. We reckoned it was a good house, the kind that we enjoyed living in. So with some circumspection, we made down the hill,that long beat down through the dying remnants of this old pine forest, and forded the River Alder — which can be very dangerous when it is in spate. But was quite easy that day,and walked up with great care — because we were old hands at reconnoitering howffs. Here was Ben Alder Cottage, But'n Ben, a room and kitchen and we made it our headquarters for nearly a week. A little porch giving access to a minute six foot square hall: to the right a door into the kitchen and to the left a door into THE ROOM and straight ahead, one little bedroom without a window — a standard highland butt'n ben, tongued and grooved lined with wood for warmth, the ancient equivalent of a highly insulated house. And attached to it was a barn, in line with the cottage, which once had had two compartments with a wooden partition between the two and two doors but which a generation or two of stalkers had broken down to use for fire wood when they were caught in bad weather.

This place was eight or nine miles from Bridge of Gaur and fifteen miles from Dalwhinnie, most of it on a rather difficult track each way. It must have been one of the most isolated cottages in all the highlands, lying at the foot of Ben Alder with a great number of Munros lying around it which we wanted to climb and hadn't climbed. Now in those days, we found that we could only carry in about three days of food in a 45lb pack when we included our stove and sleeping bag and a tent in case we could not find a howff. So we were limited to three days. After that you had to live on the land and the land meant the water. So we both carried American three foot section steel spinning rods with a primitive spinning reel, gold and silver Devons to fish these unsophisticated hill Lochs because we knew we could catch them, three or four to the pound, sometimes a half pounder, on a rare occasion a three quarter pounder.

We learned to eat them in various ways. We mashed up the fish with'oatmeal and made fishcakes of them, we broiled them, we boiled them, we fried them. We did all kinds of things with them. By the end, when we were drawing in these fish in the spinning reels from the hill lochs we had to turn our faces away from them as they came weaving in through the brown shallowing waters. We couldn't face it — the thought that we had to eat the bloody things! Now this loch was the one that we'd heard of you see and it was a marvellous loch. We actually caught up to three pounders on it, which was a very big fish for a loch which was something like 2,300 ft above sea level. This was the pass over which Prince Charles Edward Stuart had walked when he was escaping from the post-Culloden situation and he had come down to an old hut or crofters house known as "Dooms Smokey Place" which had stood on the site of Benaider Cottage — we could trace the old foundations.

Now according to the records Prince Charlie had slept one night in this "Dooms Smokey Place" before going up to Cluny's Cage where he had spent some time with Cluny MacPherson and his clansmen and they hid him and fed him there in the days after Culloden — before he eventually escaped in a French Man o'War and ended his rather inglorious life in France, on brandy. This was the spot on which we slept. For some reason which I can't remember now, we used to sleep in the kitchen where we could build a big fire of the wood we carried across from the dying forest near the side of the Alder Burn. One day we did the ridge that lay along the glen that ran down to Loch Ossian and when we came down to it, we produced as always from our rucksacks our spinning rods and we caught a few little fish, so unsophisticated that they were trying three at a time to get on to the hook. We caught a number of them and brought them down and unwillingly, as always by that time, mashed them up and made a meal. There was only one article of furniture in that house, a table.

We put it against the window in the kitchen — to the right of the front door — and in the corner of that room, away from the fire, which used to blaze at night flickering in the tongued and grooved brown varnished lining. We made a bed of heather and there we slept at night in our sleeping bags. Now we sat at the table with a paraffin primus stove between us, roaring away, and we made our meal, our tea. And as we sat there doing that, I thought I heard someone coming in through the little porch past the door which was only two or three feet from my left elbow and he went into the room on the left! I said to Tom: "That sounds like someone, d'ye hear him?" And we both sat there in the dusk and he said: "Well I can't hear anyone". And we thought nothing more and we had our meal. We built up the fire and in the warmth of the fire we lay in our sleeping bags on the heather. We lit our pipes — we were both great pipe-smokers.

Now before heard this sound, I had gone through to get Meta Mitre fuel to prime the stove and after the meal was over, Tom said: "Damn it I've run out of tobacco but I've got another tin, away through and get it". And he went through to the other room where we kept our rucksacks. I was in that marvellous state after a wonderful mountain day — lying back in a sleeping bag smoking my pipe, a feeling of great luxury. | was aware that Tom was standing at my feet and I looked up sleepily. He had a very curious expression on his face and I said: "What's wrong, Tom?" And Tom said: "Did you see this on your rucksack when you went through to get the meta fuel earlier on?" And he gave me a piece of paper. This piece of paper had written on it: "You must leave this house immediately — you are not permitted to stay here".

And there was a name, I think it was Macintosh, Head Stalker. Tom said: "You must have heard someone after all. But why didn't he come in? We would have given him a cup of tea and argued him out of it. We can't leave here at this time, 10 miles from the nearest road". Well that was that. We lay down again in our sleeping bags, smoked our pipes and thought about it but not too much. Well, by this time it would be about midnight and dark and suddenly it was Tom who heard something and he said: "There is someone through next door". And we heard this sound of a man going, bwmm, bwmm, like someone walking and then a great whrrr like a big heavy piece of furniture being pushed and then, bwmm, bwmm, and then, whrrrr. And we lay there and listened to this and we were really quite frightened.

I said: "But why doesn't he come and tell us we've got to go. We'll give him a cup of tea and talk him out of it?" And then it became intolerable. I suppose we lay there and listened to it for many minutes — ten minutes, a quarter of an hour, in a kind of increasing state of fear and uneasiness, and then we got out of our bags and we took hold of our torches, opened the door of the kitchen, went through a little hall and listened at the door and we heard this man, this thing, this whatever it was, walking quite definitely: bwmm, bwmm, bwmm then whrrrr as though it were some great heavy piece of furniture in the room. We threw the door open and shone the torches in — it was dark, it was midnight. But there was nothing, not a thing, and we walked into that room and we were really terrified.

And then we thought it must be next door in the byre which was now one great compartment paved with stones, great flat stones as far as I remember. As we stood there we heard the sound in the byre,through the wall, only this time it was as though someone with tackity boots, nailed boots, walking on the stone floor, clink, clink, clink and then whrrrrr. A heavy thing being pushed. That was how it presented itself to us, to our imagination. We really were terribly frightened and I remember looking at Tom and if his face looked like my face than it was really a study: pale, frightened with great round eyes. We went back out of the door into the porch, out the front door and this black, velvety, starless night fell upon us. We moved up the side of the house and there were two doors which led into the one compartment because the old partition between the two sections of the byre had

obviousiy been torn down over the last decade or so for fires by people benighted.

We knew it was one compartment so we opened the two doors simultaneously and before we did so I said: "It may be a stag or something that's got in". But we knew it was lunatic idea. We threw the doors open simultaneously each one of us. There was nothing, not a thing. We went in. We went right round it, there was nothing and the sound had stopped. The next morning, we climbed the walls of the cottage onto the roof and we dropped stones down both chimneys to see whether there was anything hanging from the chimneys. Nothing. I may say that we wasted no time getting back to Bridge of Gaur the next day. Years after that, having told this story to another great friend of mine, a keen photographer, hill-walker and fisherman, we made the same journey. This time we didn't sleep in the kitchen, we slept in the room where in the original incident, our rucksacks had been. And we lay there with our heads to the back wall and our feet to the window which was nailed up. In the middle of the night I woke up in blackness, dense blackness, and I heard a man walking on the pavement — there are flat stones along the side of the wall if I can remember correctly.

I was aware, as though in a nightmare, that he had stopped and was looking in through the black window on both of us. In a state of terror, absolutely stupefying horror which I cannot explain in words, I woke McCallum up, I remember his second name, and he heard the end of the footsteps and then everything stopped again. Two years after that, McCallum went with another friend and he woke up in the same room, feet to the window and was aware that there was a great light shining through the window. It was as though the sun — and this was in the middle of the night — were at the back of the window pouring a flood of light into the room and he was afflicted with this same overpowering sense of horror as I had felt.

And then it cut like that and went off and that was the end of that. Now this original friend of mine with whom I had had the first experience, Tom, had married in the interim, and he and his wife with whom I was very friendly, and I went up there to fish and climb and we met another couple who'd come down from Dalwhinnie. Tom & Jessie slept in the room in their sleeping bags and I slept with the other couple in the kitchen and we made tea, me and this young couple, and we blethered and talked away for a time. When we went to our bags we couldnt get to sleep for the noise of Tom and Jessie wandering about in the next room. They disturbed us and the next morning when we were all having breakfast together in the kitchen, we said to them: "What were you up to last night? You seemed to be moving about a lot". And that said: "Moving about? We didn't move about. We got down right away into our bags. We could hardly sleep for you moving about". Well, that is the story. We never could equate that material and physical piece of paper which must have been written by a real man with the other things that happened. Of course many of my friends have given all kinds of debunking explanations for it. But none of them fit — no, we didn't have any alcohol with us. I simply record what happened. I know of no explanation.

Anonymous: First published in Mountain life-Dec 74.

See 'The Truth about McCook's Cottage' which relates further haunting experiences at the bothy.

Sandwood Bay: Photo JMT

I was not interested in those cliffs until the trawler drove straight into them. I was above Patey's Buachaille, contemplating the channel that, in the absence of ladders, must be swum; I was considering killer whales in that channel when the trawler disappeared halfway between me and Cape Wrath. Until that moment my interest stopped at Sandwood Bay, that would become Scamadale in Miss Pink at the Edge of the World. It was the trawler that aroused my interest in the country called the Parph.

The boat had not foundered but gone into Kescaig Bay; one fixed point at the edge of a hundred square miles of wilderness that, except for the lighthouse road across its northern fringe, is untracked. The terrain is moorland swelling into low hills, but fronting the Atlantic to west and north, there are over twelve miles of cliffs, and this is the Parph: the last land seen by the wild geese before they touch down in the Arctic, the ultimate sanctuary for the last wolf in Britain. Seal-women and mermaids have been seen in its coves, and on dark nights a drowned Dutch sailor can be heard scrunching the strand of Sandwood Bay.

I went there once, in late spring, with an anti-cyclone stationary over the north-west corner of Scotland so that I could travel light, without tent or stove. I went in from the road between Durness and Rhiconich, heading in a northerly direction for Creag Riabhach, which, at 1592ft, is the highest point of the Parph.

My route was line-of-sight and followed burns, upstream and down, over miniature water-sheds. And out there, in the middle of wastes of heather, I came on a squat round cairn of sandstone flags — just one, very old and with not the slightest indication of how or why it came to be there. If it was a grave, who died here, from what cause, miles from any road? Creag Riabhach was wild and dark, facing north-east, with late primroses glowing in its shadow. Below was a clear blue lochan fringed by pale sand marked with the tracks of fox and heron. Sitting between crag and water, eating lunch, I looked at the contents of my pack and reflected that for four days those few possessions represented security.

They looked madly incongruous and served only to emphasize the solitude. Suddenly this shining world, soft, balmy and beautiful, became animate, implacable. I was aware, first, of my own arrogance in coming here, then of my vulnerability . I thought of turning back, but I looked at the shimmering horizon and knew I should continue to the coast and find shelter for the night.

Providing the weather is holding the traveller may concentrate on his immediate surroundings. All I had to be wary of was a sprained ankle, and one man at least has crawled home with a fractured pelvis. As I approached the coast the land became more dramatic and the weather changed.

Not much but sufficient to make a difference. Untracked heather and bog is tiring, and the psychological strain is a heavy factor. I was happy on sandstone pavements among sculpted rocks, delighted with a prospect of Sandwood Bay, but the breeze was freshening, already driving white horses across the lochs. By the time I reached the cliffs water was slopping out of pools before a dry gale and I was uneasy. I had one glimpse of jumbled cliffs before I turned my back on wind and brilliant sun to stagger the last mile to Kescaig Bay. There was no thought of stopping because there would be no shelter until I could get down to the shore.

Appalled by this sudden violence I applied myself grimly to the task of trying to keep my balance, of putting one foot in front of the other until I reached a lip and looked down on a tiny stone shelter roofed with turf which I hadn't known was here. I turned in at 7pm, snug in my bag on a bed of bracken. The gale raged outside but my mind retreated like an animal in its den: warm dry, safe. I slept. I woke to stillness. I could tell by the light between the chinks in the stones that the sun was on the bothy. A wren was singing; A gull called. The bay was calm and only the occasional breaker bloomed against the southern headland. Eider duck were talking softly in the kelp, fulmar regarded me with dark eyes from their nests among the thrift. I bathed and ate at my leisure, and strolled back for a mile to see what I'd missed last night.

There were orchids everywhere (I'd not seen one), the Fulmars floated beside me, a Skua came in for a closer look but dismissed me. I was harmless. The lighthouse at Cape Wrath was visible as soon as I climbed out of Kescaig Bay: a black dome a little over three miles away but twice that distance as I was forced to trace the coastline, rounding its innumerable inlets. Depressions were full of flowers, the clifftop was scattered with cushions of moss, campion and thrift in deserts of red stones. A Ringed Plover's nest was framed by crystals of rose quartz. Seals tossed in the foam below the cliffs, Skuas patrolled, handing me to the next pair at the boundary of their territory.

As I approached the corner of the land, the sea boiled under stacks at the end of the of the reef: tall pinnacles, a cubist tower, carmine rock cleft by pink dykes. The sea was green and purple, the foam dazzling. The lighthouse was built above a reef that ended in an arched pinnacle covered with birds. The keepers gave me coffee ("We put the kettle on when saw you coming"), and told me about the man camping at Kearvaig, where I proposed to spend the night. It had happened last year: the police and coastguards had found his tent empty, the food going mouldy, and nothing had been seen or heard of him since: a Liverpool man with spectacles.

The keepers and I regarded each other silently. My mind raced. At the Bay of Kearvaig the corner had been turned; Cape Wrath was now behind me, the arch below the lighthouse forming the bay's western headland, a huge horned stack to the east. Two men were camping on the strand and we sat round a fire of driftwood and talked until midnight, when I went way to sleep among the plovers in the dunes, the sunset colours still lingering in the sky. From Kearvaig eastward, the cliffs of Clo Mor rise sharply. Facing north they are shadowed and speckled with the white of birds and clumps of scurvy grass.

They are 900ft high, and vertical where they don't overhang. The sea whispers softly at their feet, the swell crawls landward in slow motion, seals bask on skerries: grey, black and silver, and sometimes, very faintly, their song rises to the watcher on the cliff. I spent the third night in the heather above the Kyle of Durness and the fog rolled in so that any dreams were threaded by sound: the fog horn, seals, the howl of the last wolf. I woke to space, to spiders' webs spangled with moisture against the cloud, to a new awareness as civilisation loomed on the other side of the Kyle.

The wilderness was inanimate but alive. It could not be intrinsically hostile but could well be a reflection of man's hostility, and his love. How many explorers have gone into the desert and found a soul out there beyond the sand and rocks? I had not heard the last wolf but my first.

Gwen Moffat: First published in High-Dec 1985

Any old Iron?:Pete Livesey circa mid seventies.Photo John Cleare

There used to be so few climbers that it didn't matter where one drove a piton,there wasn't the worry about demolishing the rock. Now things are different.There are so many of us and there will be more. a simple equation exists between freedom and numbers; the more people the less freedom.If we are to retain the beauties of the sport,the fine edge, the challenge,we must consider our style of climbing; and if we are not to destroy and mutilate the routes,we must eliminate the heavy handed use of pitons and bolts

Royal Robbins

Ten years ago I gazed in awe at one of Britain's tigers at work on Malham Cove's Right Wing Girdle. From a basking stone I watched in admiration as Dennis Gray rested on a sling before a difficult move. Perhaps I marveled more at his skill in placing a sling good enough to rest on than at his ability on the climb. I could only dream of the day when I too would have the skill and daring to place a sling and rest on it. Here was rock-climbing at it finest, the most modern and ultimate of challenges — or so I thought! It is almost a contradiction to talk about the ethics of such a wonderfully anarchistic pastime as rock-climbing. Ethics, someone will reasonably point out, are entirely personal and are nobody else's business. True, but everyone must have some historical background on which to base his personal ideas on rock-climbing behavior.

In the beginning it was the Alpine Club, then the Climbers Club and the Fell and Rock who, by suitably caustic ethical comment in their universally read journals, moulded the axioms on which the individual based his ethics. How the cutting comments on pitons in the Fell & Rock Journal shaped the ethics of Lakeland climbers for years to come! In later years, when news of the doings of Brown and Whillans had filtered through to the climbing world in general — perhaps three or four years after the events — people realised that aid had been used on many routes. But Joe and Don were the best, their routes were much harder than any before, and the new ethic was accepted.

Unencumbered by the restrictions of a patriarchal establishment the Rock & Ice had created new rules for themselves, and as established folk heroes their rules were rapidly mimicked — as one might expect. Lesser climbers adopted codes allowing themselves one or two points of aid per route; the difference now however was that Brown, Whillans and their colleagues could have climbed these routes entirely free. As early as 1939 Colin Kirkus had written . . nobody has the right to climb with pitons a route which is conceivably possible without . .

Colin Kirkus: Ethically as pure as the driven snow!

Another decline in the traditionally clear division between artificial and free climbing came from that forcing-ground of British aid-climbing- Derbyshire Limestone. Fiercely steep routes, sometimes old aid climbs, were being attempted and it became acceptable to rest on-piton-or nut runners so long as height was not gained through their use. A smug complacency settled in — we could always compare ourselves to the peg-packing, etriered continentals and claim our climbing ethically pure — the real rock-climbing. But had we known it, six thousand miles away Americans were rock-climbing with such ethical simplicity that even Brown might have thought again about his routes; had we known it, the rot in Britain may not have penetrated so deeply.

Cenotaph Corner would still carry a HVS A1 rating while Vector would be XS A1 under a purist grading system of the type much used in America. In fact any climb employing a point of aid would incorporate an artificial component in its grading. Hopefully; But I'm back where I came in — and resting on runners and suchlike, all acceptable! Had anyone bothered to step back and take a look it would have been obvious that under this system even the most extremes of routes would be climbed by the many. That is the point in any sport when the sociological factors governing the existence of the game, no matter how anarchistic, begin to modify the ethics. A ball game becomes dull if it is too easy or too difficult to score; governing bodies regularly adjust rules in the light of modern performance and equipment to avoid this very danger. And so in the last few years leading British rock-climbers have gradually rejected more and more of the aid-climbers devices.

We are leaving routes which would require a point of aid now, for better climbers later. We will fail on already established climbs if it seems likely that we need to rest on a nut. I talk of leading climbers in this context because it is they who set the ethics in our game at present. Either by their example of by their writings they are hopefully and continually improving our ethical standards. This is where many readers will grab for their pens and start writing . . . . . but I saw you using a tied-off an ivy frond on the Fang — what kind of example is that? . .' Well, yes, I did — but it saved my life. It was ethical foul but I'm still here. What kind of example is it best to pass on, an example of the worst of one's own ethics — or the best?

Why go into print to publicise one's own ethics? If ethics are a personal code then why not just leave it to teaching by example — and make sure that example is good? There are two reasons: the first is that today's leading climber is no longer a folk hero as he was in the Rock and Ice era, he is much more of a fly-by-night character. His example, no matter how good, may be forgotten in his wake were it not for the posterity of the printed word. Secondly, the climbing publications do much damage to climbing ethics by their image and content. A climber's own ethical comment is needed to redress the balance. I am frequently driven to despair by such advertisments as... You too can go right up the wall with ease' (with our gear) or You need the best equipment available and . . . takes you! to extremes. Worst of all to my mind was one recent advertisement-Bring Everest down to size! If those are not blatant ethical fouls then I don't know what is, and to suggest that one can buy one's way up a mountain (despite recent attempts) is surely foreign to any spirit that may remain in climbing.

What then are my ethics, and how did they develop? At first they derived from the example of other climbers, and then my own ideas started to predominate. It is astonishing how quickly they change. Three years ago I would have top-roped a new route anywhere had I thought it necessary. Now I would confine that particular foul only to the boldest of local gritstone problems. Today I would not use aid to force a new route, unless, even with a point of aid, it was making possible a route harder than any before. The excuse for a foul creeps in again! I call these 'tricks'fouls, but when I analyse the situation it strikes me that everything beyond a man climbing a mountain alone and naked is a foul: we must keep our tally as low as possible for our own era in history. All fouls are born equal, it is only local accent, at this point in time, that decrees the use of chalk a worse foul than nut protection.

Here Royal Robbins has something to say: he has the.. concept of climbs as not just lines but as creations containing line and style. To this I would add my own more important concept of creative quality in a new route — that of the aesthetic enjoyment possible from the physical movement involved in the climb — the exhilaration felt after ascending a series of continuously demanding moves. A climb must have this quality to be a worthy creation. On a new climb at Ilkley recently I had a choice: should I take a bold and beautiful little arete that required a piton for a handhold and protection half-way? Or should I scrape out a nearby scoop of soft rock to construct a useable hand-hold and then top-rope the route as it would be protectionless? I chose the latter alternative — the scraped hold and the top-rope — not because pitons are nasty at Ilkley but because the finished product is as fine a series of moves as you'll find anywhere. To have used a peg would have been to break the flow and spoil the prolonged physical sensations.

The tension would have been broken by the escape point in the middle. Again the letter writers reach for their pens: ' . . how can you justify any environmental ethics when you use chalk and scrape holds? Why rid the crags of defacing pitons on the one hand and paint them a different colour withthe other? Well, I have no ethical qualms about the environment; I have never rid a route of its pegs or its aid because it makes the route/crag/national park/ country- a cleaner and more natural place. I just consider that the removal of aid can turn many of the fine aided lines into tremendous climbing experiences as well. How can the climber complain of environmental damage to his climbs when he drives as close as possible to them in his noisy noxious gas-spewing car?

How can the guide-book writer professional hero complain when he condones the building of a modern rescue box as close as possible to the crags? How can the National Park Warden complain as he roams the countryside in his Landrover with his yapping dogs planting obscene signs and turning all available land into expensive camping-car-park complexes? These are my views today. But as I have said, they may change tomorrow, and they do frequently modify but always I hope to permit less fouls than before. Messner has something to say, something that we might consider a pointer for the future: It is impossible, or pointless, to grade a move when you are within ten feet of your last piton - (or nut!)

Pete Livesey: First Published in Mountain Life-June 1975

Poet Simon Armitage follows up his hugely successful ‘Walking Home’ –an account of his ‘back to front’ long distance trod down The Pennine Way to finish close to his Yorkshire home- with an account of a 2013 expedition he undertook following the northern South West Coast path which winds its way from Somerset to Land’s End. In Simon’s case the plan was to finish on the tiny Scillies island of Samson. As an undertaking this 250 mile walk matches just about anything in the UK, for despite its lack of soaring hills and mountains, anyone who has even walked a section of it will be familiar with the undulating peaks and troughs as the trail falls into hidden green valleys before rising steeply up out of the shadowy abyss in a repeating cycle which goes on for miles. Particularly in the section on the Culm Coast twixt Devon and Cornwall. By the time you have walked five miles you will have gained a couple of Welsh mountains in elevation!

For those not familiar with the concept employed by the poet, Basically, Simon offers himself as a wandering troubadour; walking the trail in bite size sections-usually between 10 to 15 miles although the average seems to be about 12. In return for board, accommodation and the portering of his suitcase between gigs and digs, he performs poetry readings at the end of most legs. The venues vary from pubs to bookshops, living rooms to yurts. At the end of each gig the poet passes around a sock- why a sock and not his expensive cattle driver's hat I don’t know?- but nevertheless, apart from fishing out the odd boiled sweet, betting slip and chewed pencil-he generally rakes in enough to make each section of the walk a profitable enterprise.

I must say, if you are engaging in an long distance walk like this and you can end each leg with a shower, hot meal and fall into clean sheets and a soft bed then why not? It might not fit in with the traditional Rufty-Tufty approach- backpacking for weeks on end with the equivalent of a small car on your back - but I know which approach I’d rather employ if I had a legion of admiring Guardian readers falling over themselves to service my every need! And by and large it does indeed seem to be the nice middle class, Posy Simmonds-esque liberal Guardianistas who are at the forefront when it comes to servicing the poet’s enterprise or indeed, who actually know who Simon Armitage is. After all, in X Factor UK 2015, poets are generally as well known as Edwardian spiritualists or Inuit whale-catchers. I’m sure, despite the predominance of the aforementioned culturally endowed, a lot of people who turn up for his readings have just been told , ‘we’ve got a bloke, Simon Something, coming to the village hall whose been on telly and written books and stuff’.

Starting out at Minehead, Simon stays in the Butlins Holiday Camp although, by his own admission, he chickens out at giving a reading to an audience where replica football shirts and spray tans are much in evidence, and hi tails it off to give a reading in some rustic hostelry where freshly pressed Denim and Laura Ashley is the preferred dress code. ‘How could I compete with an Olly Murs tribute act’ he later offered as an excuse for this act of cultural cowardice!

Wandering through ‘Zummerzet’ with a different entourage picked up at each leg, he encounters a bountiful harvest of humanity whose quirks,charms and indiscretions provide a rich source of material. From the Country squire complaining about ‘The Ravens ruining his land’-Simon later realises he means ‘ the ravers’- to the tramp bearing the legend ‘Fuck off Toffs’! With his keen observational eye and descriptive talents, he brings to life this endless parade of characters and sets them into a landscape which even to the unfamiliar is imbued with familiarity. The sun dew on wet grass, the diamond backed sea, the shadows which speckle the dense copses and the owl haunted country graveyards falling into night.

Jane Darke's beach side garden at Porthcothan: Photo-Helen-Kernow Education Arts Partnership

I’ve seen Simon described as ‘saturnine’ in some quarters...Never! What I love about his writing is his wry laconic humour and like most Northern folk, he’s not averse to using self deprecation to keep his boots firmly on the ground. Drawing the reader in to a world where stages are completed with the aid of ibuprofen and a muttered prayer to St Christopher; where cloudbursts wash away optimism and fellow travellers peel away like flotsam on a Devon tide as the sea fret becomes a sea squall. This style fits the pace of the book perfectly. Whether he’s describing the characters, the land, the sea or his mood and physical condition, it’s hard not to engage with a writer who wears his heart on his sleeve and who isn’t afraid to puncture the overall mellow vibe with the occasional dark thought and reveal doubts about the validity of the entire enterprise.

However, his spirits are never beaten into submission for too long and aided and abetted by his moveable feast of fellow walkers, The Marsden Pied Piper, each night, leads his assembled troupe into the welcoming arms of his hosts, where, refreshed and with batteries recharged he can regale the local communities with anecdotes and poetry before Morpheus takes him on a well earned journey into the land of nod.

Along the way, various characters weave in and out of his orbit. Margaret Drabble describing how she offered to put up Salman Rushdie at the height of the Santanic Verses brouhaha. Not expecting him to take up the offer, she was rather taken aback when he turned up with a team of bodyguards and security goons! Artist and filmmaker Jane Darke feeds him figs and black pudding at her beautiful gaff above the beach at Porthcothan near Padstow. As someone who has partaken tea and cake here with Jane, I can confirm the generosity of mine hostess and the aesthetic delights which abound hereabouts within a home and beach top garden which is decorated with the colourful bounty collected through the tireless ‘wrecking’ of the Atlantic shore.

Towards the end of the journey, Simon’s body is starting to resemble his boots. Falling apart at the seams and held together with spit and hope! His keen descriptive eye never loses its perspective though and people and places remain as vivid and well observed as the day he took his first steps in Minehead. I’m not sure if he has a photographic memory, walks along jotting into a notebook or constantly addresses a Dictaphone??? Whatever device he uses he certainly captures the essence of the journey throughout and the pace of the narration never lets up for a moment.

Will this be the poet’s final epic long distance walk? After all, he is a fifty something academic more used to frequenting the libraries and lecture rooms of our metropolitan centres of learning than battling the elements in remote climes. It wouldn’t be a terrible spoiler to hint that this may be the case although I detected a weakening of resolve as, back home in Yorkshire, he gazes at some new walking boots still wrapped in tissue paper in the box they came in.

Man at Sea and Hay. Simon Armitage photo: The Telegraph

I certainly hope so for Walking Home and Walking Away have both been excellent and although outdoor zealots might snort at this outsider bringing long distance walking into the Sunday Times Best Seller domain and somehow sullying its Spartan tradition of grim suffering and mortification through the adoption of a ‘walking for softies’ approach, well...tough! It's Long distance walking Jim, but not as we know it and you'll never think of a Galapagos Tortoise in the same way again either!

John Appleby:2015

Walking Away is published next month on Faber and Faber.

Rating on the Krab-o-meter

Once there was a town hall official in Cumberland who was so enthralled by the mountains that he walked and walked them, penetrating every byway, surveying every vista. To amuse himself he drew them and wrote about them, year after year. And the more his marriage languished, the more he walked, and drew, and wrote, until the seven volumes of A Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells were complete. His public grew and grew, following in his steps, his books in their hands, until the paths through the dales and up the fellsides were ground deeply into stony grooves, and the man himself was heard to wonder if he had ‘helped to spoil the place’.

A typical double-page spread from one of Wainwright’s guides consists of a densely-woven montage, half-map, half-picture. Inspect it closely and it turns into a wonderfully clear instruction on how to find, then climb a Lakeland mountain or walk through a Northern dale. A wedge of hand-lettered text, cunningly shaped to fit the spaces between the pictures, describes the terrain. It is packed with knowledge, salted with asides to the reader, spiked with warnings against falling off or getting lost. An assortment of facts and captions is pieced into any neuk that remains. The vignettes themselves depict a looming massif, instantly recognisable, garnished with one or two wee extras – a stark outcrop, a slatestone pillar like a totem, a lone barn, a rock-mouth funnelling down into the bowel of the limestone.

If you read closely between the lines of Wainwright’s treatment of the Buttermere fell called Haystacks in his Western Fells of 1966 – the seventh book of his series on the Lakeland fells – a physical and emotional identity between the man and the place begins to stare out at you:

Seen from a distance, these qualities [‘great charm’ and ‘fairyland attractiveness’] are not suspected: indeed, on the contrary, the appearance of Haystacks is almost repellent when viewed from the higher surrounding peaks: black are its bones and black is its flesh. With its thick covering of heather it is dark and sombre even when the sun sparkles the waters of its many tarns, gloomy and mysterious even under a blue sky. There are fierce crags and rough screes and outcrops that will be grittier still when the author’s ashes are scattered here.

Yet the combination of features, of tarn and tor, of cliff and cove, the labyrinth of comers and recesses, the maze of old sheepwalks and paths, form a design, or a lack of design, of singular appeal and absorbing interest. One can forget even a raging toothache on Haystacks.

This is him – this is the man himself. He was reclusive and hard to know, surly and taciturn. He liked to walk alone and in perfect silence, even when a rare companion (such as his second wife, Betty) was allowed to go along with him. He was ashamed of his own unattractiveness, as he saw it: his inability to chat, his coarse red hair, which he ceased to hate only when it turned into a white mane. In a Scots word, he was crabbit – which shares that fricative ‘cr-’ with so many kindred words: crusty, cross-grained, crag, craggy, crozzley, crooked.

Wainwright wrote and drew himself onto his pages with an unequalled completeness and an obstinate devotion. His prose is old-fashioned and could be mistaken in snatches for Victorian English – ‘gloomy and mysterious’, ‘of singular appeal’. Earlier in The Western Fells, Great Gable is described as ‘a harsh and desolate peak thrust high in the sky above the profound depths all around’. In the conclusion to the third book in the same series, The Central Fells, he waxes nearly Wordsworthian: ‘an inexpressible humility fills the heart ... I must hasten now to the Scafells, noblest of Lakeland’s cathedrals, while good health and appreciation of beauty and simple reverence and gratitude remain with me, for when I have lost these blessings I shall have little left.’

He likes to address his readers directly, even while he labours to instruct them. His remark about toothache being forgotten on Haystacks is characteristic. In The Central Fells he draws himself, foregrounded, in a vista of Raven Crag Thirlmere, with the pawky aside that this is meant to be ‘a special treat for readers’. In the conclusion to The Western Fells he sets up a familiarity with his readers when he assures them that although the main series is now complete, ‘I also have a good title for another book: FELLWANDERER.’ This is all the more Dickensian for being commercially long-headed as well as endearingly matey.

Wainwright’s close-grained determination to incorporate himself into the Cumberland and Westmorland that he so loved shows through poignantly in his reference to the scattering of his ashes on Haystacks. Fellwanderer (1966) ends with these sentences:

But time is running out. Every day that passes is a day less. That day will come when there is nothing left but memories. And afterwards, a last long resting place by the side of Innominate Tarn, on Haystacks, where the water gently laps the gravelly shore and the heather blooms and Pillar and Gable keep unfailing watch. A quiet place, a lonely place. I shall go to it, for the last time, and be carried: someone who knew me in life will take me and empty me out of a little box and leave me there alone.

Then, as this threatens to become too Little Nell, he adds: ‘And if you, dear reader, should get a bit of grit in your boot as you are crossing Haystacks in the years to come, please treat it with respect. It might be me.’ And so it might. As Hunter Davies tells us in his thorough biography of the man, two months after he died in January 1991 at the age of 84, his wife and an old friend, both in their 70th year, climbed up to the tarn at seven in the morning by way of Honister old quarry and consigned his dust to that hummocky moorland.

When I took on Haystacks and its cliffs for the Fell & Rock Climbers’ guidebook to Buttermere eight years ago, I tried to evoke the bristling stature of the place, drawing on my own experience of its trickling and collapsing gullies, which few people have penetrated. I wrote that it was a ‘handsome mass of mountain, deeply gullied, spurred with broken buttresses, the first of which hides a fine hard climb in its oozing innards – a route that has everything – areas that make Lego look solid, avalanches of flowers, and a traditional chimneying pitch of tremendous stature’. The Club didn’t like it at all – too literary, and too favourable to places that lacked the clean-cut glamour of Napes Needle or Gimmer Crag in Great Langdale.

I got my way, with difficulty. Wainwright’s feat was to dispense with all such mediation. He sent the Westmorland Gazette – a weekly Kendal paper founded by Lord Lowther in 1819 to propagandise against the Radicals – pages that were exactly ready for the press: the correct size, so no reduction or enlargement was needed; hand-drawn and hand-lettered in waterproof Indian ink, so no typesetter was needed; and of course no illustrator. The Gazette, as Hunter Davies recounts in detail, used no middleman, no representatives. They took no advertisements and used no promotion on radio or TV. Their author refused all interviews or appearances until late in his life – although he took that puckish delight in drawing and writing himself into his pages.

Those pages, many hundreds of them – seven guides to the Lakeland fells, five books of Cumbrian mountain drawings, six of Scotland, guides to the Pennine Way, the Yorkshire limestone country, a coast-to-coast walk and on and on – were mostly drawn and written in Wainwright’s evenings. He was Borough Treasurer of Kendal. His small house on the Green had one public room and here he worked while his wife and son, who had nowhere else to go, were made to sit in silence. No telephone, no television. Precious few friends. ‘There was never a single free evening when I didn’t apply myself to the task with the eagerness of a lover.’ When his first wife, Ruth, had some friends to tea and Wainwright came home unexpectedly from the office, she shooed them out of the house: ‘Everybody out,’ she cried, ‘he’s back!’

His son Peter shared Wainwright’s walks when he was a boy. Touching black and white snapshots show him neatly dressed, standing alone in a green trod between limestone walls, dutifully consulting a map. In his fifties he had to retire early, joints swollen with arthritis. Wainwright, who died worth a quarter of a million, left him nothing. Davies thinks Peter was resented because he was ‘Ruth’s son’ – and Wainwright had been on Trappist terms with his wife for decades by the time he started secretly courting a prettier, more bourgeois woman and the faithful, selfless Ruth left home at last.

Here is Wainwright’s account of the breakup, from Ex-Fellwanderer (1986): ‘Three weeks before I left the office for good, my wife walked out of the house also for good, unable to tolerate any longer obsessions of mine that left her out in the cold, and I never saw her again. I was not greatly concerned.’ Hunter Davies quotes this and glosses it, or glosses over it, by saying that Wainwright was ‘trying not to hurt the feelings of all concerned’. The economy with the truth here matters more than that. Wainwright had been corresponding passionately with his Betty for two years. Davies has evidence that it was a letter of hers, rashly brought home and found, which drove Ruth from her home. When a separation was negotiated, she undertook to wash and bake for him once a week – he accepted, of course, but she had the spirit to revoke the promise almost at once. They had never been suited.

Wainwright breaks the chief rule of decency in these cases – not to miscall your erstwhile partner: ‘I was climbing the ladder to a professional career, but my wife, a mill girl, had no wish to leave the bottom rung.’ In fact Ruth took to holidaying on the Continent, she bred dogs, she read novels (which he did not); and she might have accompanied her man on his endless stravaigs if he had made her welcome. She walked for two and a half hours every afternoon with a woman friend for 21 years, so she was at least fit. But she was a mill girl, and she had no ‘qualifications’, and he despised the Lancashire accent, although he was from Blackburn himself, the fourth child of an alcoholic stonemason and a woman who took in washing.

Wainwright’s deeply compacted and introverted character is what we would want a biography to light up. Hunter Davies at least supplies the information, while eschewing analysis except of the most obvious kind. All that silent, lonely walking, across and down every least co-ordinate of the English highlands – was it chosen or was it perforce? Davies argues for the latter and points out that Wainwright happily organised group outings when he was a young accountant’s clerk. When the couple became estranged, he argues, Wainwright accepted the necessity of being solitary and manufactured virtues from it. It seems more complex than that. I think he embraced the necessity. Assiduously he secreted the hard, thick shell inside which he could be himself.

When he at last appeared on television, walking round the Lakes and the Scottish Highlands and sitting down on selected rocks to be plied with interviewers’ prompts, he was comically taciturn. He cut off with perfect readiness from his son, from his first wife, and from his most faithful associate, Henry Marshall, who ran a one-man Wainwright distribution network from his own home for ten years and then was suddenly dropped.

Wainwright was a loner. His habits were frugal in the extreme and monotonous in the extreme. If people called, he never came downstairs. He invariably finished his weekend outings with a solitary fish supper (and took pieces of fish home in his pocket for his beloved cat). He amassed – not coin but miles, paces, summits, routes, stones. This flowed straight into his style, its laboriously minute detail, its sameness from district to district and season to season. He was a master of topography all right, and you have only to compare his work with other professionals in the field, John and Anne Nuttall in their Mountains of England and Wales (1990), for example, to appreciate his mastery. Their drawing style is rectilinear whatever the subject; rocks become blocks and right-angles creep into the skylines. Wainwright does much subtler justice to the variety of rock types and land forms and to do so he had to spend that much more time, take that much more care.

‘Every page of my ledgers should be fit for framing,’ he remarks in Fellwanderer. Here is the juncture where die bookkeeper morphoses into the draughtsman-writer. Every figure in each column must be just so, and so must every stone in every wall and every boulder strewn down every slope. The Lake District is stony, to be sure, textured throughout with granular outcrops and scree-slopes like great robes of tweed. Need they have been drawn quite so speckled and hatched, so dotted and pelleted that the fell-sides begin to seem like cross-sections of some colossal haggis?

By the same token need he have specified each walk quite so minutely?
Take the rising branch-path from the Traverse into Needle Gully, and go up this to the base of the pinnacle; a scrambling track opposite climbs up to a ledge known as the Dress Circle, the traditional balcony for watching the ascent of the Needle. From this ledge a higher traverse can be made along the base of the crags, going below the Cat Rock into Little Hell Gate, but there is a tricky section initially and this is no walk for dogs, small children, well behaved women and the like.

Midway between the two Hell Gates, Needle Gully and a branch gully, full of scree, cut across the South traverse ... If proceeding west (i.e. from Sty Head) the two rising branch-paths may be followed by mistake without realising that the traverse has been left, they being the more distinct, a circumstance that does not arise when proceeding east.

And so on and so forth, for something like two hundred fells. Should we really treat the exploration of wild country like this? Wainwright doted on the Ordnance Survey maps and used them to plan his walks. I have used them to pick out precise sites for family camps in Harris, Benbecula, Jura, Wester Ross – spotting with their help the windbreaks, the curving beaches, the freshwater sources – then gone there and found them to be so.

Is this not as much help as the explorer needs? In the first review of a Wainwright book, Harry Griffin wrote in the Lancashire Evening Post in May 1955 that the author ‘ran the risk of taking all the adventure, the joy of discovery, out of the fells by the very completeness of his work’. There was no stopping him. He was expressing himself – recording his own experience of poring over his beloved uplands – and his books are best treated as a person

David Craig : A version of this article first appeared in the London Review of Books-1995

Original Photo: Adrian Bailey

Don Whillans took a firm grip on the undercut handholds, leaned out from the rock and sized the job up. The route was Dovedale Groove on Dove Crag, E1 5b. It is his route. On May 4 1953 (when Colonel John Hunt and his party were establishing their camps in the Western Cwm of Everest) Don and two mates from the Rock and Ice Club, Joe Brown and Don Cowan, parked their motor-bikes near Brotherswater, walked up to the crag and had a go. Don led the first pitch and Joe led the second and that was the job done. August 1984.

The intervening 31 years have brought a lot of changes to the sport and to Don. When he made the first ascent he was 20 and weighed about 9-1/2 stone. At the age of 51 he admits to 14 stone and looks, if anything, heavier: 'My problem', he said, 'is going to be getting the paunch over the overhangs. That and not using up all my strength in the first bit. I was feeling quite confident on the way here but I'm not so sure now. It looks steeper when you get under it. I might have a struggle. Think it calls for a spot of market research'. He moved up and had another long look at the problem.

Dovedale Groove is one of those climbs where the hardest moves are at the start. There is a vertical wall, perhaps ten feet or so, with no footholds worth mentioning and not much in the way of handholds either. Don had never been back to look at the route — not even in 1960 when he came to the crag to create Extol — but he remembered one thing clearly: 'The crack higher up was easier than we expected. But this bottom part was a lot harder. I hung a sling on a little flake and stepped up in it — that did the trick. But the flake's gone now — you can see the bit of clean rock where it was. So we'll have to fix a sling in this crack somehow and I'll step up on that. It'll have to be a good 'un — a 14-stoner'. He experimented patiently.

He found a pebble that lodged securely in the crack and adjusted the rope sling to a comfortable length. 'That'll probably do. If I can't do it with that, I can't do it at all. I'm definitely not going to attempt it without some aid'. He descended and scrambled up the easier rock to the left of the groove to study the handhold higher up: 'Christ! It's as round as a baby's bum'. For a man of such bulk he is still compact and surprisingly neat in all his movements. His feet and hands are small and he uses them deftly, with the maximum of precision and economy. Everything is worked out first.

He does not make hasty or clumsy movements — or statements. The Whillans style has not changed with the years. He uses short words and short sentences, sometimes enlivened by a vivid image, and the flat Lancashire delivery increases the effect of directness and confidence. There is no artifice, nothing phoney, no hint of self-doubt. He says what he thinks and when he has nothing to say he shuts up. With Don the style is very much the man, reflecting a unique and positive personality.

'I like to climb at a level where I feel comfortable and this is a couple of grades above that level'. So he was wearing P.A.s — he wore gym shoes on the first ascent — and he was not going to lead it this time. And he was not going to apologise for the fact that he used the aid of a sling when he first did it: 'When you're doing it for the first time, you do everything to conserve your energy. You don't know what's coming next — how hard it's going to be further up. So if you can fix a nice little leg-up, you do it — to save the strength in your hands and arms.

It's all right for those who come later. They can read all about it in the guidebook. They know what's coming. There was no guidebook to this crag in 1953 — there were only three or four routes on it'. On the first ascent they had a nylon rope that kinked badly and half a dozen nylon slings with karabiners with which they hoped to fix a few running belays. That was about it — no helmets, no harnesses, no nuts. On August 17 1984 Chris Bonington and Don were planning to use much the same gear — apart from Don's P.A.s — but in other respects things were very different. They did not even have to walk up to the crag. A helicopter dropped them 200 yards from the foot of the route, along with a small army of attendants.

Climbing for the cameras is slow work — that is why Don had so much time, too much, to study the crux and work out how he would tackle it. The whole thing was to be filmed as part of a series Chris is making for Channel Four about important Lake District climbs (others include Eagle Front and Footless Crow). Luckily, it was a warm day and the rock was bone dry. Finally, everyone was ready. The main camera rolled and Don and Chris walked the last few yards to the foot of the route, pretending to puff and blow a little, then they prepared for the climb and chatted about it. Chris — wearing tennis shoes — tied the nylon rope round his waist with a bowline in the old way and wrapped his nylon slings over his shoulder.

He selected a variety of pebbles and distributed them about his pockets. Don remembered that the rock had been dry on the first ascent and that the cracks had been crammed with gunge. He had had to do a lot of gardening. After the conversation piece there was a lengthy pause while the camera was unloaded and someone came over from the tents with sandwiches and cans of drink. Don, anxious to get cracking, bore it all with patience. The years have mellowed him. It is many years since he dobbed a policeman or any other uniformed interferer. And, after all, he was being paid for sitting around in the sun. So he kept control. When they were ready to resume shooting a voice came through on the walkie-talkies: `Is Don happy?' The reply was muted but loaded with the laconic impact for which he has become notorious: `You'll be lucky'. The cameras rolled, clapper-boards were clapped, the director called 'Action' and Chris moved up past Don, comfortably belayed, to confront the chief problem.

Chris is turned 50, only a year or so younger than Don, but he has kept himself trimmer. They both have beards now but Don's is the more grey and grizzled. They are very different in style and character and conditioning and they have not always seen eye to eye. But they have known each other for 27 years and they have climbed together a lot in the Alps and the Himalayas and there is a mutual respect and trust. Chris carefully fixed two pebble-slings in the crack and clipped the climbing rope into the karabiners. He did not intend to use the slings as footholds and somehow he managed without them. One big upward lunge and and the crux was conquered, unaided. `That first move is quite hard', he called down. Don had been amused to see one of the runners come out as Chris writhed above it: `I've already lost faith in your chock-stoning, 'cos it's come out, the bottom one'. But the higher one held firm and this was the one he would need for his sling foothold.

A few moments later Don was remarking on the propensity of gym-shoes for 'curling off' small rounded holds when Chris's left foot,pat on cue, demonstrated. He quickly found a more secure hold. "Did you see that, Don?' `Aye. Proved the point I was making. I bet that got the adrenalin pumping'. Before long Chris was belaying at the top of the first pitch, and the cameras had to be reloaded so there was another intermission. At last the cry of 'Action' was heard again. `I'll just get my sweater off', Don shouted up. 'It looked a bit hot'. Then he moved up to inspect the sling and test it with a couple of hearty tugs. `It's strong all right but is it 14-stone strong? We'll soon know'. There was a short struggle to get his right foot into the loop, then he transferred his whole weight: `Hang on tight. The pebble's moving. It's going down the crack nicely'. But it held long enough.

Keep the rope tight, Chris. I've got the hold — it's just a matter of heaving this paunch up. Give it the big heave'. And he was there — or, at least, on to slightly easier ground. `Jesus. I don't remember it being that hard. It's a real bollock-stretcher, that. When I tried to get my foot up I hit my belly with my knee'. Soon after, he joined Chris at the belay. The first, worst pitch was done. That was the end of the day's climbing. The helicopter pilot was reported to be worried about the immediate weather prospects so they would stop now and come back tomorrow or the day after to film the second pitch. They abseiled off and the chopper lifted them back in time for a jar or two before dinner.

Alan Hankinson: first published as 'Don does it again' in High-November 1984.

Ravenglass

One hears tales of the balmy days of the British presence in India, when walks in the Himalayas were done hands in pockets unencumbered by camping equipment, since the bulk of one's retinue had gone ahead to set the camp up, unfold the armchairs and brew the tea. Alpine literature too gives evidence of ample entertainment in the high mountains. The English milord had not only a guide but porters as well, laden with hams, roast fowl and bottles of wine. W. T. Kirkpatrick, writing about the Alps at the turn of the century, commented that 'the number of bottles that mark the route up many well-known mountains would almost suggest that some persons climb for the sake of drinking.

Even in Scotland a ghillie would arrange for hampers to be taken to the hill on the backs of ponies, so there was no need to pack sandwiches and waterproofs and spare clothing; and the revolting convenience foods which afflict the outdoor life today were unknown. But those expansive days are not wholly passed away. They have their modern counterpart in the supported walk. The first example of the modern supported walk that I came across was as long ago as 1954, when Crosby Fox, George Spenceley and I were doing the Cuillin Ridge. Our pleasure in the excursion was tempered by having to carry a rope, quantities of water and a good deal of food, including a jar containing eleven eggs sloshing about in half a pound of sugar. At two or three points such as the Bhasteir Tooth we met Alpine Club members whose mission was to provide food and drink and a rope for some of the recently successful Everest climbers who were taking a celebratory romp over the Cuillin Ridge. The supported walk par excellence!

The simplest form of supported walk is where you prevail upon someone to drive you to the start and pick you up again at the end. But for the true hedonist in the hills that is hardly enough. A friend of mine once described seeing a well-known Greek shipping millionaire step out of a helicopter at the top of a ski-run in St Moritz. A valet placed his skis on the snow. He stepped into them. The valet adjusted the bindings, handed him the sticks and scurried back into the helicopter, his next duty being to take them off at the bottom. Something akin to that is what we are after. The snag with supported walks is that one can hardly justify support unless one is undertaking something pretty demanding. The support party will play only if sufficiently impressed by the exploit in question. I have the good fortune to know the non-pareil of walk-supporters, Mike Harvey. He will not only support your walk: he will put the idea into your head and then carefully fan the feeble flame of interest into a fire of enthusiasm.

Ever since I drew attention to it in the book 'Big Walks', Mike Harvey had been offering to support the Shap to Ravenglass walk, and he now proposed an actual date, May 2nd. My character is such that I will agree to almost anything if the date is sufficiently far away, so I did not demur. In fact, so long as the whole thing remained comfortably in the future it formed an attractive and absorbing topic of conversation. It is a curious thing that long walks appear to be more attractive than short ones. People who would normally get out the car rather than walk one mile nevertheless flock in hundreds to do the Lyke Wake walk of forty. As Ronnie Faux pointed out in the Times a month or two ago, walking is really rather a pedestrian business, and it needs the spur of inordinate length to goad the imagination a bit.

So several people are now expressing an interest in walking from Shap to Ravenglass and it begins to look as if we are actually going to have to do it. As the date approaches and what has been a pleasing idea becomes an alarming reality my health, never robust, begins to decline perceptibly. I even try to defer the whole thing, but without success because supported walks have a juggernaut effect; once set in motion they take a lot of stopping. However, I have devised a training schedule for events from which escape proves impossible, which I have found most effective. I work up by easy stages to a stern regime of complete and determined inactivity, with long spells of prone and supine lying. This I have found leads to an excess of nervous energy on the day which can carry one through whatever one has let oneself in for.

The final party turns out to be quite small and also quite disparate. The average age is forty-seven years. There is my son, Mike Harvey's son, and Etsu Peascod,* a young Japanese lady who combines a fragile flower-like beauty with the heart of a Samurai. A dream of pastoral bliss with bells in the distance turns into the shrilling of an alarm clock. It is the hour. I wake Etsu and my son Trevor and we head for Shap. The only other car on the old A6 turns out to be Mike Harvey and his son Matty. Well met. We park the cars at Keld, and set off walking at ten past three. To give myself every possible advantage I wear my ancient suede desert boots (known to veterans of the Western desert as brothel-creepers). Down at heel though they now are, and paper-thin in the soles, they weigh only eleven ounces each. I am relieved to note that the young and energetic Matty is wearing stout boots which will hold him in check a little I hope.

I am quite familiar with the footpath that takes one past Tailbert into Swindale, but in the dark it eludes me. Within twenty minutes of starting, my feet are soaked and we are lost among waterlogged tussocks. With forty miles still to go this is discouraging. We give up looking for the path, go through the Tailbert farm buildings and make for Swindale on a compass course. We can see a dark gulf ahead with a pale gleam of water in it that might be a nearby puddle or a more distant river. Before long we come to the Swindale Beck and crossing it at a shallows get at last on to the road.

Our progress on up the dale is marked by the furious barking of dogs at each farm, and we work it out that should a sash window be thrown up and a shotgun appear we will lie down on the ground until both barrels have been discharged before attempting to explain what we are doing. We take the old corpse road and by the time we reach the grassy upland between Swindale and Mardale it is broad daylight. A cuckoo starts calling; it is the first I have heard this year. It is a good experience to walk from darkness into daylight and we know what the man meant who wrote: ' A solemn glee possessed my mind at this gradual and lovely coming in of day' . Furthermore we appear to have picked a winner. The sun is a little obscured by clouds, but they are dispersing. Skylarks ascend, carried upwards by the sheer volume of their song. It is cool and crisp, High Street and Kidsty Pike standing hard-edged against a clear sky. The zenith is already becoming blue. We descend the zig-zags into Mardale and hit the road. Half a mile along it is our support car. ' You're twenty minutes late', says Mike Harvey, serving tea and biscuits. Handing in our torches we go round the head of the reservoir and up towards Blea Water. About level with the tarn there is a right fork in the path and this slants up to the ridge of Caspel Gate.

We go slowly up to the little col and then up the ridge looking down into the deep trough of Riggindale. Soon we are treading the long high back of High Street. There is no simpler and more innocent way of feeling superior than to be out walking on the hill-tops while the rest of the world is rubbing its eyes, groping for a cigarette, or dragging the bed-clothes rebelliously over its head for another ten minutes. We ramble on down the five-mile descent to Patterdale, one of the most enjoyable ways down a hill that I know. The going is easy, some of it level or even mildly up-hill, yet one is traversing steep slopes and enjoying views into the grand side of the Helvellyn range. Angle Tarn is beautiful. As we finally descend into Patterdale the valley lies below, calm and dreamy in the clear morning air, except for a man running urgently across a field. This is Mike Harvey, caught napping by our early arrival, dashing to put breakfast on.

He and his other son, Benny, have the car parked in a tastefully appointed lay-by, with seats, at the point where the footpath debouches on to the road. There is fruit juice, a choice of cereals, porridge, king-size bacon butties, rolls and marmalade, and coffee. The sun beams down upon us, his chosen. We drink to Al Fresco. Our way now leads up Grisdale, the young fellows so charged with calories that they keep disappearing ahead despite their big boots. It is a very pleasant valley, Grisedale, its pastoral charm eventually giving way to more craggy terrain, until it ends suddenly and dramatically at Grisedale Tarn. We trip daintily across the wet ground north of the tarn and drop down through a slot towards Dunmail Raise. The path is muddy and ruinous, and the two lads pull a fast one by going out on the flank of Seat

Sandal and finding a long tongue of snow to glissade down. Our supporting party is drawn up on the grass verge, kettle boiling, luncheon all ready. It is midday and we have come half the distance. From Dunmail we go straight up the side of Steel Fell, and so, at the expense of one stiff pull, gain access to that long upland that carries you right across the centre of the Lake District.

It is a little wet underfoot, with odd patches of old snow, but fortunately skin is a kind of super Gore-tex and our feet remain dry on the inside. For the rest, it is a bright and invigorating day with a few white cumulus clouds. We drift up over High White Stones, that second broad, airy upland on this walk, and slant down on to the top of the Stake, assisted by one or two snow patches. The next section, round the side of Rosset Pike, begins to feel a little long. It is tea-time, and in the natural order of things we should be taking a cup of choice Assam to see us through until we can decently think in terms of gin and tonic. We flag a little, there is no denying it. But we have two things to look forward to in the immediate future; one is reaching our second Angle Tarn of the day and the other is making our final col, Ore Gap.

At Angle Tarn we sit down for five minutes, the two lads having already been there about ten, gathering a little head of steam for the last ascent. It is very pleasant here in this familiar spot and we are in good shape, all moving parts functioning satisfactorily. There is no real urgency about getting on the move again . . . But then we think of our support waiting on the road, and we get somewhat listlessly to our feet. From Ore Gap we can see the sea, and the Isle of Man, and, as like as not, Craig yr Isfa. The sea is still a long way off but it is manifest that there are no hills in our way, and we take heart and even get ahead of the lads for a few minutes in our plunge down into Eskdale. I have spent many a day and night in Green Hole and never found it a dry place, but we stride heedlessly through the luxuriant heavy-contract deep-pile carpet of moss, straight down the valley. We turn aside to look down the waterfalls and into the pot-holes of Lingcove Beck. This is my old home valley and I seem already to have reached our destination.

We pass the pack horse bridge, the bathing dub at Throstlegarth, Heron Crag, and Brotherilkeld Farm, and come out on to the road at the foot of Hardknott. At the gate are Etsu's own special support party. We hear a sharp report like the popping of a champagne cork. It is the popping of a champagne cork. 'But we've another ten miles to go' , I expostulate, the words impeded somewhat by the passage of bubbly down my throat. Champagne is not to my knowledge much used in the hills, but it certainly has a future. Along the road, in another tastefully-selected lay-by, Mike is ready with delicious viands spread out upon the herbage. It is a splendid calm evening with plenty of day-light still left, just the occasion for a post-prandial riverside stroll. Leaving the road at Doctor's Bridge we walk the delectable footpath along the side of the Esk. It turns out to be one of the most enjoyable parts of the whole walk. Just above Boot Church two iron girders span the river, all that remains of a railway bridge, and we cross here in preference to the stepping stones further down, in case they are under water.

The way now leads through tall woods, and we notice for the first time the decline of the daylight. The woods are delightful after so much time on the open fells. There is no question of going over Muncaster Fell, I am happy to report. We take the entirely satisfactory private road down the side of it, appreciating the evening light on the meadows between us and the Esk. For a mile or more someone has been inconsiderate enough to mend the road, with the result that not only is the ' way strewn with cutting flints' but Trevor, with the infra-red vision of the historian, finds two large examples of Roman brick in a drainage ditch, and we have to carry them in our hands for the rest of the way. It is now quite dark and we lose slightly the sense of time and distance, but we walk buoyantly on, the bit between our teeth and the smell of the sea in our nostrils. The last mile or so is on the road but at last we come to the Ravenglass turning and break into a stately canter. The village street ends in the waters of the estuary. The tide is right up. We let it wash over our toes.

Tom Price and Etsu Peascod's champagne celebration

Tom Price: First published in Climber Oct 81

* Wife of Climber/Artist Bill Peascod

Photo: John Cleare Collection

I am not a pessimist, but I couldn’t help wondering if I was wasting my time as I packed crampons, ice-axe, head torch, gaiters, climbing helmet and other gear. For the rain was battering on my window, and the weather forecast promised nothing better in the next 24 hours. I was bound for Fort William, to give a lecture, and Fort William and Ben Nevis go together. There was plenty of snow on the Ben, and I had thought it just possible that there could be an overnight change, not only in the overhead conditions, but in the watery eyes, running nose and spluttering cough which were giving me a below-par feeling.
So off I drove after lunch into premature darkness up the side of a Loch Lomond half lost in the gloom of pressing rain clouds – clouds discharging ever more generous measure as I caught the full force of the wind on Rannoch Moor. Then a lift to the spirits as the Buachaille hove into view, its black wedge standing up like a rock skerry amidst a turmoil of vapour bursting from Glen Etive around the lower crags.

Then through the jaws of Glencoe for the descent through waterfalls, spraying out of a gloom so dark that I had to switch on my headlights, though the time was not yet four o’clock. After winding round Loch Leven, half-blinded at times by the glare of oncoming heavy vehicles taking up most of the narrow road, it was a relief to get to Banavie and relax in the house of my host, Dr Allison, who promptly gave me a throat lozenge! My slide lecture that evening was to the local branch of the Saltire Society. It was good to meet old Lochaber friends. It was good, too, to get to bed at half-past midnight and know no more until a rap on the door in the morning told me it was nine o’clock.

“See your doctor and get an antibiotic from him if you are no better by Monday,” advised Dr Allison. Meantime, I drove off up Glen Nevis in the unchanged weather, intent on having a walk through the gorge to Steall.
Even in a downpour you can enjoy the nobility of a place such as this, with the swirling river brimful and spray from it shooting up like steam. This was the spectacle around Polldubh, where the crags close in and the road is forced across to the north side of the glen. And it was just short of here I overtook a smartly-dressed gentleman in city suit and raincoat. He carried a sizable parcel, done up so that it could be gripped like a case. As I stopped to offer him a lift, I thought it strange that he wore no hat on a day like this.

“Thanks, thanks, but I want to walk,” he said in a curiously strangled voice. I drove on, assuming that he must ‘be walking no farther than Polldubh. I had forgotten him by the time the great water-slide of the Allt Coire Eoghainn came into view, a virtual avalanche of white pouring 1200 feet down the gorge wall. That cataract descends the longest and steepest grass slope in Britain, at an average angle of 35 degrees. The actual slide is 1500 feet, but the slope goes on right to the top of Ben Nevis. I once climbed up all the way, and once was enough!

Donning an anorak and water-proof trousers, I took a wee walk along the high path, just to relish this most Himalayan of Scottish gorges. It could almost have been the Rishi itself, and Stob Ban, with its snows, and the clouds scudding amongst its crags, Nanda Devi. All scale is relative, and everything here, the Caledonian pines, the birches, the rowans jutting askew from the crags hemming the thundering river, is in perfect unison, made even more splendid where the Steall waterfall comes into view, blocking the mouth of the gorge in a 350-ft. spray of noble waterfall.

Turning back after that sight, I was soon at the car park and driving down the road again when who should I see trudging steadily towards me but the bare-headed city gent with the parcel. I nearly stopped to offer him my spare hat, if only to find out where he was going, for there is no house other than the Steall Hut, so I can only conclude that this was his destination, perhaps to deliver a parcel to climbers in residence. Yet if that were so, why had he spurned my offer of a lift? Whatever the truth, I hope he had a change of clothes waiting for him, for he was going to need them.

Home, I decided, was the place for me, and despite the foulness of the day there was a queue for the Ballachulish Ferry, so I had time to look at the progress of the bridge as I waited. It is steadily pushing out from both sides, and will soon be meeting in the centre. Forty minutes, and I was over the other side, turning into Glencoe and knocking on the door of a freshly white-washed farmhouse called Achnacon.To my delight, the man himself answered it. Hamish Maclnnes, lean, lanky, a slight touch of ginger in his wispy beard, and a smile of welcome breaking his normally slightly serious expression.
“Great to see a friend. You’re just in time for some coffee. I’m just down off Buachaille Etive Beag. Didn’t go to the top, though. Too wet, nothing to see.”
“Don’t tell me you were climbing for pleasure today?” was my response.
“No, not for pleasure. Just to keep fit.

It was great a week past Friday, plenty of snow, and we cramponed up the Curved Ridge, really good. On the Saturday I was on Bidian nam Bian looking for ice to test out the crampons properly. It’s a new design I’ve worked out, and I think it’s going to be good.”
I told him I had really called to congratulate him on a safe return from the bird-eating spiders, the tarantulas and the scorpions in the jungles and on the Great Prow of Roraima.“It sounded terrible,” I said. “But your book made a fine adventure story, and the television film was superb.“I think you would have enjoyed it, for the wild life was really fantastic.”

Hamish never tries to impress you. He tells his tales in bits and pieces so that you have to quiz him for details such as hunger, illness, hardship and close calls with death. So almost casually he told me he wasn’t doing very much just now except designing equipment for the winter attempt on Mount Everest and working on his novel.“Yes, it’s an adventure novel set in Scotland, and it would never have been started if I hadn’t had that spell in hospital last summer. It’s maybe the closest call I’ve had to death.”

Then he told me a remarkable story almost stranger than fiction.The train of events began at St Abb’s Head on the Berwickshire coast, when a drystone wall collapsed as Hamish scrambled over, and he took quite a bruising on the legs. One of the bruises had been punctured by a pointed rock, and it was so painful that he had difficulty in getting into his car.Next day he had planned to go hang-gliding in the Pentlands (another throw-away line.) I didn’t know he had built himself a hang-glider and was learning to fly it), but the friend who was to join him called off. So with time on his hands, Hamish decided to go along to Edinburgh Royal Infirmary and see if he had a broken bone, for the pain in his leg had worsened during the night and was beginning to worry him.
However, things were moving slowly in the Infirmary that day. Hamish waited and waited for his X-ray, finally got fed up and left. Now we come to the part where the Goddess Luck played her part. Hamish was kept in Edinburgh for a business appointment next day, so instead of driving off immediately to Glen Coe, as he had previously intended, he decided to go back to the Infirmary and try again for an X-ray.

When the doctor in the Casualty Department saw the X-ray plate she recognised on it a tiny pocket of gas gangrene. Instantly she called in the surgeon.Hamish had a shock coming to him. The surgeon did not pull his punches.“We’ve had three people in here with gas gangrene. Two of them died, and the other lost a leg. We’ll have to act immediately, for even the time it takes you to drive from here to Glen Coe could make the difference between saving your leg and losing it. And once the infection spreads beyond the limb, nothing can be done. So it’s a good job you came here today.”
The stone which had punctured the bruise had carried the infection, probably on bird droppings. And I could echo Hamish’s feelings when he said thoughtfully, “It’s quite frightening to know this can happen.”

The surgeon had told him that gas gangrene was a common cause of death by bullet wounds in World War I. Thanks to antibiotics and penicillin drugs, its effects can be arrested today, and, fortunately, the tissue-destroying gas shows up on X-ray plates.Hamish showed me the scar on the region of his shin bone, an angry oval of red flesh.“I’ve made a metal plate to put over it, for I’ve got to see the skin doesn’t break. l began the novel during the 18 days I was laid up in hospital. I’m enjoying it. It’s over 80,000 words, and it isn’t finished yet.”

After that came the next throw-away line by the Grand Master. Not for nothing has he earned the title, “The Sage of Glen Coe”.“Yes, it was handy to go right out to the North Face of the Eiger and get fit again.” I waited as he said ruminatively, “Actually, it was mostly going to work by helicopter. But you did get a bit more climbing every day, so it was an easy way of getting back to fitness again.”

The “work” that Hamish was referring to was his part in the overseeing of the safety arrangements for the Hollywood sex, assassination and climbing film called The Eiger Sanction. Some of the action on the North Face involves a lot of falling, and this is where Maclnnes’s engineering skill came into play. For the most exciting incident he built a gantry projecting out over the face. From this, an actor had to hang from a rope suspended 3,000 feet over a drop, then take a knife from his climbing jacket and cut the rope, to fall clear, and swing on another rope, also attached to the frail-looking gantry.

“Bonington took a real fall while working on the film,” said Hamish. “Took a clean peel of twenty feet out on the face, but he went back up to his lead point again and got over it. Davie Knowles, who used to work with me in Glen Coe as a climbing instructor, was killed by stonefall on the second day of filming. I’ve lost a lot of good friends in the last few years . . .” .“And now you are planning another tough winter attempt on Mount Everest by the hardest route. I thought you had had enough on your two attempts in the spring and autumn of 1972.”

“I thought so, too,” said Hamish. “I was hoping to go to South America, but l became so involved in the designing of better equipment that I left l couldn’t refuse when Chris Bonington asked me to be deputy leader. It’s really interesting to try to beat the equipment problems Everest sets you when you have to go so far above 27,000 feet.“None of the tents stood up to the conditions last time. I’ve designed a Super Box with curved hoops like the kind tinkers use in the Highlands, but with four longitudinal members bracing it. And as well as a strong outer covering, I have tried out a light- weight metal mesh to go over the top. It’s so strong that the biggest boulder I could throw down on it just bounced off. We’ll have better floor insulation, too. “

“I’ve also borrowed an idea from the old volcano kettle, where the heat is in the centre compartment and the water is in the jacket round it. I am trying out at dixie which fits on to the stove, but the heat goes into an empty cone of metal. You push the snow into the top, and it melts in contact with the hot cone inside, so maybe we won’t have to wait four hours for the stove to melt and boil water at a boiling point of 60˚C.

“The oxygen problem is interesting, too. I’ve been in touch with the Americans and the British Army, and we should have new-type cylinders 26 inches long by 4¼ inches in diameter, weighing only 10 lb, just half the weight and giving every bit as much oxygen as the old type. I’m having special valves made in the States, and I’m experimenting now how to get better control of the supply. The oxygen apparatus on the last trip was hopelessly inefficient.”
“Anyway, we’ll be trying all the gear when we go out to the Alps in January to camp high in the Mont Blanc area. For really big crevasses, I’ve worked out a way of jointing ladders and attaching down ward-pointing stays round which you can run a cable from both ends so that the ladders become one rigid bridge.”

For the new attempt there will be seventeen climbers, six of whom have been on the South-West Face before. Haston and Maclnnes will make a powerful pair, and two Glenmore Lodge instructors will be in the party, Peter Boardman and Alan Fyffe. Mike Thompson, who was with Maclnnes on Roraima, will organise the food, and after the starvation of the Lost World trip, it is to be hoped that the cuisine will be varied and plentiful.

As for the route, this time Bonington and Maclnnes are attacking the crucial rock band farther to the left, where they hope to be able to climb a snow-filled chimney at 28,000 feet and traverse right across the face to reach a gully giving access to the summit. The all- important thing is to be on the mountain as early as possible. It is hoped to have base camp set up by August 25, to give the climbers a chance to make the summit before the cold and the wind become too desperate for survival at these heights.

“Come over and see the workshop. You haven’t seen my new set-up. You know that my job is to design better equipment and work out improved techniques in rescue work, not only on mountains, but for, oil-rig and oil-platform rescues.

I thought what a lot had happened to Hamish in twenty-one years. He emigrated to New Zealand and opened up a lot of new routes there. Then he set off for Everest with Johnnie Cunningham, with only a few quid between them. Now he’s going back to try the most difficult way to the top of Everest, with the most expensive expedition ever mounted, costing £100,000 no less.
Hamish climbed with Chris Bonington when the latter was just starting his climbing career, and now the pair of them must be amongst the best-known and most respected climbers, writers and photographers in the world.

“Strange the way it works out,” Hamish responded to my comment. Then, as an afterthought, as I was about to drive away, he said, “I forgot to tell you. I was out on St Kilda last summer. Joe Brown and I were landed on Boreray to try the big pinnacled face that leaps 1,400 feet up to the summit. We thought it might give a great climb, but it was no use, really nasty, too much grass and too many birds, gannets all over the place. The big stac in Soay Sound is the one we would like to have done, but there was no time. The place I really want to go to most of all is the Trango Towers in the Karakoram. If Everest hadn’t come along I think Chris and I would have gone there. But it can wait.”
It was Tom Patey who first brought back a report on the Trango Towers. He reckoned they were the hardest-looking vertical faces he had ever seen. They will be just right for Maclnnes and Bonington!

Tom Weir: 1976

“My brother was a climber back in the 50’s-quite good I think’. As the Communist Party meeting emptied into the damp Mersey night,the visiting national organiser from London chatted to local activists. “This is Pete’; the area secretary introduced my informant. Pete Betts’. Mild interest flickered. ‘Your brother’s name isn’t Vince by any chance?’

Later in the pub to my mounting excitement, Pete pieced together the jigsaw. Vince Betts had exploded across the climbing scene in 1955 when he seconded Don Whillans on Slanting Slab on Cloggy’s West Buttress, of which historians noted in ‘The Black Cliff’... No previous climb had combined such difficulty, exposure and lack of protection, and few have since.

Then, like a one hit wonder, Vince had vanished. Out of the blue (Or rather, out of the red!’, 30 years later I had stumbled upon his trail. “ He lives in Harare, I’ll send you his address’ said Pete.In Braided Lives, novelist Marge Piercy skilfully weaves together the apparently unconnected trajectories of her main characters into a shifting web of interconnections. Discovering Vince Betts' tracks had the same effect on me. I had followed his footsteps across Slanting Slab's still frightening first pitch in 1965, when I seconded Dave Potts on an early ascent. In 1975 I had written about the climb in a chapter in Hard Rock. Now, 18 years later, across three decades and two continents, guess whose rope feels braided with mine? We have never met, but Vince has corresponded voluminously; generous outpourings of memory, hewn in painstaking hand-writing, by someone to whom I suspect writing does not come easily.

His story shouts out to be told, a forgotten fragment of our history that lights up a way of climbing life that has all but gone. So I've picked out several recurring themes from the wealth of material Vince's letters make available.

Vince Betts was born into a catholic family in Sheffield in 1934, the eldest of eight children. He left school at 15 and served an arduous apprenticeship as a fitter at loco-motive sheds in Millhouses, Grimethorpe and Derby. A neighbour, John Storrey, introduced Vince and some of his teenage pals to climbing. "He got hold of Climbing in Britain by J.E.Q. Barford and top-roped us up climbs at Burbage with a 100ft Italian hemp rope." Thursday evenings were weekend planning time. "Every one was fun — climbing, sleeping in barns, boozing, getting sick. I was very aware how many friends got married very young. I just felt sorry for people who did not understand the call of the hills.

To get to them I would let nobody stand in my way." Don Cowan, who was to second Joe Brown on the first ascent of the Cyrn Las classic ‘The Grooves’, introduced the youthful Vince to harder climbing and to the Rock and Ice, and in 1955 he was accepted into the club. "In those days there were strict criteria to join. You had to be able to lead VS on any rock in Britain and also you had to be able to get on with the lads." Vince qualified on both counts. "In the early 50s there were probably less than 5,000 climbers in all. You could go to Stanage on a sunny Saturday morning and see only two or three other groups. Quite a few climbers were working class, but most came from the university clubs. I viewed. Oxford accents with suspicion. It was always them that went to the Himalayas with champagne and porters. "Never did I train for climbing. As a manual worker it appeared a waste of time.

In fact it was unheard of in the 50s. You got fit by doing lots of hard climbs." By modern standards Vince's generation also climbed without equipment. "The best footwear was Dunlop Ventner tennis shoes, or the cheaper plain black Woolies plimsols — both gave a good grip. After a year I managed to buy a pair of walking boots and had them nailed with clinkers. With my own hemp rope, a few krabs and slings and an ex-army anorak, I felt like a real climber. "From the Rock and Ice I learned a lot about safety techniques. They were regarded with awe — not only because they had the best climbers who went climbing every weekend in all weathers — but because they had a tremendous safety record."

The summer of 1955 was glorious. Vince, often climbing with Jimmy Curtis, Tom (Lou) Waghorn and Ron Moseley, had done Gargoyle and four other climbs on Cloggy's East Buttress. On July 9, bound for Bow Shaped Slab, Lou and he were enjoying Mrs Williams' Rock and Ice discount at the Half Way House Cafe. In walked Don and Audrey Whillans. "We told him our plans, but he insisted we should accompany him to 'have a look' at a new route he'd seen. Knowing Don's surly moods of those days, we decided it was better to go along rather than get a biff round the ear. "Well, we went to the start of what was to become Slanting Slab. Don undid his rucksack and pulled out the gear. It was only then I realised that 'look' meant attempt. "Don tied on, grabbed a few slings, pitons and a hammer, and in a commanding voice told Lou to tie on. At the time Lou was a sub-editor with the Sheffield Telegraph and was not as developed bodywise as us manual workers. 'Don, this is not my type of climb,' he stammered. Don's face became black with rage. 'Right oh! Vic, (he always called me Vic), you can tie on then.'

Reluctantly I did so, and Don proceeded to climb the access pinnacle and place the first peg." Vince had never used artificial methods in climbing. "I came in for a torrent of abuse from Don. He moved off the pegs and made the long leftwards traverse above the Western Terrace." Twenty years later in Hard Rock, I wrote: "Even as you crouch in slings on the eaves of the slabs, only 20 feet from second, thermos flasks and solidity, the exposure begins to snap at you. Once over the lip, the snap becomes a snarl..." Vince, like myself — and many other seconds subsequently — was contemplating where his penduluming body would end up in case of a fall when "a party of Cambridge types came up the Terrace to see what we were up to, and one of them, Ted Wrangham, offered me a back rope. I tied my 140ft rope round my waist, gave it to Ted and set off in my sand shoes up the pitch.

"I found no difficulty (the climbing was then unprotected 5b) until around 20ft from Don's belay, when I asked him for instructions, as there appeared to be no holds, just a huge void under my feet. 'You see the big vertical crack, the one you can just get your finger nails in? Use that and swing across.' Don was very pleased with my performance. "Ted still held my rope from the back-stop position on the Terrace. Don climbed up the next, easier section in good spirits, did not take a belay, and just kept on climbing to the full length of his 150ft Viking nylon rope. "With a fisherman's knot and two half hitches, I tied Don's rope onto mine, pulled up mine from below, and belayed him up the rest of the 180ft pitch." When Whillans took in the slack rope, the knot jammed, and Betts had effectively to solo part of the pitch, coiling the rope as he climbed. "After that the climbing was OK until I reached a steep wall with a loose, downward-pointing piton. As Don used it, the piton had moved. With a tight rope I managed the move.

How Don - 5ft 3 inches against my 5ft 7, did it, I don't know." Audrey, who had descended from the top, greeted the two climbers at the top of this epic pitch. "We went down to Half Way House and celebrated with a cup of tea. Mrs Williams had been following our progress through binoculars. We didn't say much about the route because we didn't give it a name for about a year. "Five years went by before it got a second ascent, by Joe Brown and Harry Smith I think, and they were both suitably impressed with its difficulty. We were even accused of breaking off the handholds, but we told them there weren't any to break off. "Years later I heard that Hugh Banner was talking to someone about the first ascent in a pub in Wales, and said that Mortimer Smith was Whillans' second. Someone corrected him, whereupon Banner, unaware that Don was listening, retorted, `Ah yes, Betts' only claim to fame.'" And what's thine?' floated Whillans' rejoinder along the bar."

The Black Cliff has little to say about Betts, save that he was "a noisy, swarthy-faced character who enlivened the climbing scene at the time." In one of my letters I asked Vince what he thought of this description of him. "My most famous nickname was Black Betts, probably because of my motorbike gear. It was said that I used to go through the Betws-y-Coed bends clipping my own ears on either side on the bridge parapets. "In the mid-50s everyone liked the old climbing songs, but we used to worship The King', Elvis. I remember Dennis Gray singing Rock Around the Clock while leading a climb on Cloggy, with the rope going up in jerks in time to the music. At hard bits he'd go quiet, but at the jugs the music would start again." Christmas '56 was a famous Rock and Ice meet at Wasdale Head. "One night after closing time, we had a game of barn rugby, played with a can of baked beans, about 25 to each team and several injuries.

Don Whillans was in his element - right in the thick of it all. "Once Wilson Pharaoh, the landlord, came leaping over the bar because a climber had used bad language, although he later took the towel off the pumps after closing time, with a loud shout of 'first orders please!'" Another theme runs equally strongly through Vince's letters — work. It is unusual today, when Britain's manufacturing has been laid so low, to read an account of a climbing, career squeezed between loco sheds, factory and building site. His descriptions make work in Sheffield and Manchester's heavy industry sound like hard, grueling graft, so gushing about the "dignity of labour" is out of place. Nonetheless the framework — the counterpoint— that honest toil provided, comes through very strongly as the other side of the coin to Vince's bacchanalian hedonism, as does his bitter resentment at "being too busy working when I should have been climbing."

How the words of the Manchester Rambler have echoed through the lives of Vince's generation of climbers. "I'll be a free man ON SUNDAY." In 1960 Vince emigrated to Australia, followed by spells in New Zealand, Canada, Zambia and Namibia — working on hydro-electricity schemes and in mining, wherever he could use his engineering skills, sometimes living what he calls "the alternative lifestyle"— getting married, doing a teacher training course and all the time going into the mountains. Sometimes he was spotted back in Sheffield, to which he occasionally returned, but always wanderlust seemed to pull him again. Once Whillans, on a visit to New Zealand, sought Vince out "in a town called Cromwell, where they grow the biggest and best apricots in the world. I was amazed how much weight Don had put on. He had just returned from an expedition down the Amazon. Naturally we went to the pub and yarned into the night.

The original feature spread

Then we breakfasted on Lake Waitaki shore." Now the family — a wife and three teenage kids — is settled in Zimbabwe, where Vince trains new generations of fitters for the engineering trade at the local poly, keeps bees for a hobby and spends much time on exploration, visiting wildlife parks and going on walking safaris; rock climbing on Wednesday evenings in Harare quarry, being an active member of the rowing club and trying to import a pick-up truck from Japan. Old climbers never die, they just climb different things! Vince's life is braided also. "After Don lost his licence for drunken driving, (front page of the Mirror - my mother sent out the paper), he bought a pedal cycle to get to the pub when he lived at Rawtenstall. "I stayed at his place in Wales on a visit in April '85. He gave me the bike — a green Peugeot sports — as he'd no further use for it. I still use it. It's in my garage in Harare. I look on it as a memento of a great climber and of great days."

Dave Cook: Climber, March 93.

The Shiant Isles
I never thought I would find myself writing warmly about a Scottish laird. Adam Nicolson owns the Shiant Islands, east of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. The Shiants are a compact cluster and, like all small islands, offer the marvellous sense that you can encompass them, you can easily walk or sail round them and get to know each rock-face or sand-bar, each vein of water or peat-hagg lip. Islands make you attend to them with the most intimate focus, until you know them entirely and understand the reason each feature, natural or civilised, is as it is. That stone-heap on a west-facing slope, is it scree, or a cairn, or the remains of a house? Who made those cup-holes in a reef by the shore, and why? When did somebody last dig those lazy-beds, the ridges for potatoes or barley that corduroy the rough pasture? Nicolson has spent so many days and nights on the Shiants that he has had time to pose every conceivable question about them and to delve for the answers.

The Shiants were points on the well-frequented seaways of Western Europe when the landways were still mudded and laborious. Two scallop fishers recently dredged up a gold torc from near the islands’ western reefs. The bracelet is ‘as exotic as a silk dress on a cliff face, Audrey Hepburn, somehow, en route to the North Pole’. It was made in the Bronze Age, a period in which, according to Nicolson, ‘the human person is glorified and with his egotism comes his guilt.

He carries remarkable weapons. He wears jewellery. His body becomes the arena of his glory.’ Nicolson brings ancient and medieval times close, but he also gleans powerful stories from the islands’ recent life. By the 19th century only a shepherd lived there. About 1830 the wife of one shepherd, a man called MacAulay (his given name is not remembered), climbed down the northern cliff on Garbh Eilean to gather seabirds for feathers and meat: ‘She killed the birds and hooked them by their necks, into the rope around her waist. One day . . . the rope broke’ and she ‘fell into the sea, where, because of the number of fowls hanging from the rope around her waist, she did not sink, but floated out to sea watched by her husband, who could do nothing to help her.

How weirdly different, and in one sense how similar, was the experience of two debs (bridesmaids-to-be of Princess Elizabeth) who came to the islands in 1946 as guests of Nicolson’s father, Nigel (son of Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West). They lasted a night. Wakened by noisy rats, they screamed. Nigel would have to row them back out to a fishing boat in the morning. But he had forgotten to tie up his dinghy, which had drifted out and shattered on the rocks: ‘Nigel entered the freezing waters of the Minch, swam out to the boat and returned to the beach with a rope. Elizabeth and Margaret stood waiting in their floral prints. Nigel tied them on, one by one, and they swam out towards the herring drifter, speechless with cold, while their skirts spread like peonies around them.

When Nicolson sets out to uncover Shiant history, he is able to bring over, first, an archaeologist from the State Institute in Prague and then an entire team of Czech archaeologists every summer for five years. They dug up and sifted the layered fragments of the old black house on Eilean an Tighe until they knew its life in the finest detail. When Linda Cihaková made a cut or sondage through the floor, she uncovered a smooth, flattish, rounded stone about twelve inches across, ‘buried in the clay and peat ash of the mid-18th century’. It was deeply incised with a cross enclosed in a circle. Nicolson at once began to find out its history, travelling to Sheffield and Edinburgh, phoning Inverness and Dublin. The stone must have been made by a hermit, probably out of Torridonian sandstone from Applecross on the mainland. When the early missionaries founded a new church, they carried with them, ‘in a bag blessed by a bishop, soil or stone from the mother church’. Here was a source for the name of the islands: sianta is Gaelic for ‘uncanny’ or ‘hallowed’.

It’s characteristic of Nicolson that he researches the stone in the most expert way, but also in the most homely. He carries it to and from the Shiants in the bilges of his boat, the Freyja, ‘acting its part as holy ballast, leant on by the dogs and cushioned by my sleeping bag’. It is so charismatic a thing that everyone delights in it. The schoolchildren on the nearest inhabited island, Scalpay, tried it as a pillow. A woman in the toll-booth outside the Dartford Tunnel said: ‘That looks nice.’ A man at a garage thought it was a fossilised meat pie, and an expert in early Christian sculpture at the Royal Commission for the Ancient and Historical Monuments in Scotland stroked its surface and said, ‘“Yes, yes,” as if it were a homecoming’.

Although nobody lives permanently on the Shiants these days, men from Scalpay graze their sheep there and catch whitefish and scallops between Lewis and the islands. These are long-standing habits. When the Victorian laird was trying to justify the clearance of all the crofting townships in the part of Lewis closest to the islands, now called Pairc, he made out that the crofters’ fishing grounds were too distant to be viable. A generation later their descendants testified to the Napier Commission that the fisheries were excellent and were round the Shiants, just two miles away.

The origins of the Shiant place names were known to islanders such as Neil Nicolson from Stemreway, on the fjord called Loch Seilg which opens towards the Shiants, where I did fieldwork last summer. Stemreway (now transliterated as Stiomrebhaigh), a site of extraordinary beauty and habitability, is still mantled in dense green turf, backed by an outcrop for building stone, with a peat moss just yards away. The best houses were roomy, with vegetable fields enclosed by stone dykes. A stand of aspens chatters on the bluff above a river flowing out of a circular tidal lochan which would have made an ideal fish-trap. Stemreway was one of six villages cleared in 1843 by a family called Stewart (who figure in some scalding stories told by Adam Nicolson) so the place could be turned into a ‘sporting’ enclave – a base for killing animals, birds and fish – centred on Eishken, the next settlement along the shore.

The estate is still frequented by sportspersons in Barbour jackets and gamekeepers in natty olive tweeds. The Eishken employees, according to Nicolson, were instrumental in exterminating the Shiant birds of prey, including white-tailed sea eagles, to conserve the profitable grouse. When Nicolson was helping the Scalpay men to gather and dip their sheep on Garbh Eilean, the largest of the Shiants, ‘eight handsome men and women’ arrived from Eishken on a 38-foot, ocean-going, twin-diesel estate boat called the Incorrigible. They lounged about in their fleeces and sunglasses, pretending that Adam and the crofters weren’t there, until he went over to them and asked: ‘What are you up to at Eishken?’ ‘Probably drinking too much,’ replied one of the young bloods.

Nicolson knows that for well-off people to own parts of the Highlands is invidious. At the start of his book he retails the remarks of a man who came up to him in Macleod’s Bar in Tarbert, on Harris, and said: ‘Well, you’re a sackful a shite . . . You can no more say that those islands belong to you than I can say that I’m the landlord of the moon.’ Towards the end he describes his debate on ownership with Robert Stewart of the SNP National Council, considers whether ownership and management by the local community would be the just solution, and concludes that ‘flexible and responsive’ private ownership can be more ‘open’ than ‘exclusive community ownership’, adding that anybody who wants to stay in the one house on the islands can get in touch with him at adam@shiantisles.net. Nicolson wants the Shiants to remain part of a living society. He knows their harshness and their goodness, ‘neither more privileged nor more deprived than anywhere else’, with ‘the benefit of the good soils, the riches of the birds and fish. It was not to be deprived of anything the mainland could offer. It was a sea room with sea room, a place enlarged by circumstances, not confined by them. Each experience of his island life is beautifully described.

Quite casually, and with no fanfare, no advance warning, from between your feet the islands start to groan. A long, deep moaning emerges from the slits between the dolerite slabs. It begins slowly and builds, a deep and exhausted exhalation. It is like finding a room in which you thought you were alone suddenly occupied by another, a voice emerging from a long dead body.

When the rock breaks, ‘the bare unlichened stone smells of iron or even blood, because blood smells of iron too. The smell is one of deep antiquity, a release into the nostrils of elements in the rock which have not been volatile since the rock was made. It feels as intimate as poking your fingers into a wound.’ On a dark day the gannet is lit like a crucifixion against it.

I could never tire of this, never think of anything I would rather watch, nor of any place I would rather be than here, in front of the endless renewing of the seabird’s genius, again and again carving its path inside the wind, holding and playing with all the mobility that surrounds it like a magician with his silks, before the moment comes, it pauses and plunges for the kill, the sudden folded, twisted purpose, the immersion, disappearance and detonation of the surf.

David Craig: A version of this article first appeared in the LRB-2001

Photo:Vertebrate

Having recently read and reviewed Steve McClure’s Vertebrate published autobiography which I felt somewhat suffered in that it became rather repetitive due to the fact that the author himself was operating in a rather narrow field of activity, I was interested to see how an old hand like Ed Douglas would take on someone who like Steve, operates within those same tight parameters which define the top end sports climber. In this case, Ben Moon, a climber synonymous with state of the art routes like Hubble, Statement of Youth and Agincourt but who, at the end of the day, is not exactly a Fowler, MacLeod or Boysen when it comes to being a climbing all rounder.

With a limited palette to draw from, it requires some creativity to fill an autobiography of 200+ pages; particularly when the subject is still in their 40’s and presumably with a lot of goals and achievements ahead of them. To the author’s credit, he makes a fine fist of the material available and doesn’t get bogged down in the technical minutiae which rock jocks are prone to use when writing about their climbs and projects . Instead, fleshing out his subject and presenting him as someone of interest and integrity rather than a one dimensional climbing machine.

Ben Moon like his friend Johnny Dawes is certainly no scion of a horny handed son of toil. Born into a comfortable Home Countries, middle class family, his father Jeremy Moon was a talented artist of some renown and the young Ben was brought up within that comfortable, slightly bohemian suburban setting which for a youngster, is never less than stimulating as fascinating friends of the family pass through. Having a grandfather in Jack Moon who was a keen climber in his day, it was no surprise that the young Ben Moon should take an interest in the activity. An interest which took root early in life through family holidays in the mountain areas. However, it wasn’t before the young Ben Moon had suffered tragedy through the loss of his father who was killed in a motor biking accident when Ben was only six.

Ben was brought up by his mother Elizabeth and eventually found himself as a boarder at the somewhat archaic Christ’s Hospital Public School; renowned for the rather wacky school uniform and eminent alumni . It was at Christ’s Hospital that perhaps not surprisingly, he developed an anti authoritarian streak and began to evolve into the proto punk. An image which defined the young climber when he first came to public attention as a pale, skinny, dread-locked rebel with a cause.

Like just about every climber whose lives have been dissected in biographies like this, it is remarkable how consistent they are in what you might call ‘the experience trajectory’. Time and again the same venues and the same climbs feature as these future stars climb the ladder of success. The local outcrops; the first trip to Snowdonia. A journey- usually in an old van- to Fontainbleau. Then its Verdon, Buoux, Yosemite and the Yorkshire limestone cathedrals of endeavour etc etc.

The author charts his subjects’ rise to prominence through diary notes, interviews with Ben Moon himself and contemporaneous material drawn from articles and journals of the time. It paints a picture of a young man who, whilst not sharing the same capacity for self promotion and playing the sponsors game in the way his friend Jerry Moffatt did, was equally single minded in his desire to push the envelope and become one of that elite band of sports climbers operating at the limits of technical achievement. Like so many of his contemporaries within this select band, Ben did the competition circuit with mixed results. It did at least establish his name within the game and as routes like Agincourt began to fall, the previously dismissive UK climbing press, began to recognize and acknowledge his place amongst the cream of the crop.

Apart from charting his subjects climbing achievements, the author touches on areas where Ben Moon has experienced conflicting fortunes in his relationships, business ventures and answers that old question as to just what exactly Ben Moon did at the 1990’s Newbury By-Pass protests? Like a lot of people, I was given to understand that he had gone down there as a highly paid security goon. Employed with othersfor his climbing skills, to essentially remove environmentalists from the trees to allow their felling.

However, popular myth has it that gamekeeper turned poacher and he cast aside his Hi-Vis jacket and joined the Crusties!. As it turns out, neither story is strictly true. In the book, Ben Moon and Jerry Moffatt turned up to lend their support- although it has to be said, short of actually taking to the trees. (If anyone wants to learn more about this read Jim Perrin’s brilliant ‘The Judas Tree’ which, written from an environmentalists’ perspective quite rightly lambasts those climbers who took their twenty pieces of state silver). However, what Swampy & Co made of two tanned climbers turning up in a sporty silver BMW Evo is anyone’s guess!

As an aside to his income from sponsorship, Ben Moon launched his S7 range of climbing wear and bouldering mats although without the necessary business nous to bring the business on it eventually foundered, although later,, and with more business savvy, he launched his to date, successful ‘Moon’ climbing label.

The book winds to a close with Ben Moon- now married and with a daughter- joining that army of former rock stars who now prefer to get their fix through bouldering. No surprises here as a young Ben Moon once went on record in a radio programme to utter those immortal words...’I’m not climbing to be in nice places...I’m climbing for the moves man!’.

Certainly, not many UK climbers in the last thirty years have been in the same ball park when it comes to bending the body and torturing those tendons like Ben Moon. Yes- ‘Statement’ reflects the life and times of someone corralled within that small world inhabited by the technical elite, but it nevertheless throws light on an individual who has never been that interested in self promotion or being a climbing Charlie Big Potatoes. Ed Douglas- who of course won a BT award for his Ron Fawcett book- has penned another fascinating portrait of a UK rock master.

John Appleby:2015

Available from Vertebrate

Krabometer rating

There cannot be more than half a dozen real hard men, perhaps youthful aspirants to the Alpine Climbing Group, who have made the journey, on foot and by road, from the beginnings of Llanberis Pass to Beddgelert. To the best of my knowledge I am the only man living who has made this appallingly dangerous journey on two occasions. Of the second, on which I had a companion, I have already written in another place, but my solitary attempt has remained unchronicled. I now set out, below, what I recall of my experience in the spring of 1951. I was not able to make notes at the time, but the facts are essentially as I record them here. About ten o'clock one morning towards the end of March 1951, or it may have been 1950, I was sitting in the bar (since remodelled and renamed the Smoke Room), of that small hotel at the foot of Llanberis Pass which is known to all travellers in those parts.

I was sipping a whisky and soda, having just finished reading a most excellent article on the climbing situation in Wales in the 1940s called 'Return to Arfon'. On the table in front of me was a big blue-covered volume, 'Rock Climbing in the English Lake District', by a man called 0. G. Jones. Some people from a place called Keswick had taken some old-fashioned photographs to illustrate the work and I was finding it of interest. My presence in that hotel at that time of year was due to an obligation I was under to write a work of fiction containing a gang fight in Wales, preferably on the face of a steep rock climb. My thoughts had no connection with Beddgelert and were indeed focused upon the measurements of the bar. It had just occurred to me that a determined man, sitting where I had positioned myself, could hardly miss the landlord with a shot from a .32 Mauser pistol, if the landlord happened to be standing at the cash register. At that moment the door of the bar opened and the landlord's wife came in to join me.

She was not in those days much given to conversation, being endlessly busy about the house. 'I've come to have a little chat with you', she said, 'It's nearly eleven o'clock'. `So late', I said, emptying my glass, 'I was sitting here thinking'. `Not thinking', she said, 'Drinking'. `So I was', I said, holding up my glass, 'I must have another of these'. `That's what I want to talk about', she said. 'You drank a bottle and a half of Scotch last night in this very room, and here you are doing it again, or in a fair way to doing it again, before lunch. You should go out more, into our lovely hills'. `I did that from this very hotel, just after Christmas,' I reminded her, 'and I was ill for weeks. Your lovely hills are very dangerous.' I stood up, all the same, and returned the red Journal of the Fell and Rock Climbing Club of the English Lake District to the corner bookshelf in the bar which, in those days, had twenty or thirty of the Journals, but not one of them with anything quite so good as 'Return to Arfon.' I didn't know what any of it meant. It was just interesting to read.

The author was a man called A. B. Hargreaves, and I didn't know him either. I put 'Rock Climbing in The English Lake District' under my arm. It had just come into my head that my hero might well be reading it in his bath when a villain, still uninvited, thrust a gun through his bathroom window. The essence of thriller writing is that heroes', preferably unarmed, should invariably outsmart relentless thugs with guns in either hand. It seemed to me, as I weighed it in my hand, that 'Rock Climbing in the English Lake District' was at least throwable. `I'll get hold of my packed lunch and go', I said. I tried to sound a little hurt, a trifle wounded: I've always found that difficult.

The landlord's wife picked up her broom and duster. 'Don't forget to take off those red slippers,' she said. There was a packet of sandwiches lying on the hall table bearing the legend, 'Mr. Fitzgerald, no cheese'. As cheese makes me frightfully ill, I knew what would be inside the grease proof paper, but I shoved the packet into the little knapsack I used for carrying books, put aside 'Rock Climbing in the English Lake District' while I was putting on my shoes, and walked out into the icy conditions of a Welsh spring morning. A man with a coiled rope over his shoulder was standing motionless in the driving rain. He was wearing scarlet stockings, and what appeared to be velvet knickerbockers.

There was a look of total despair on his face. 'Have you seen Marcus'? he asked me. `There was a man in the bar last night they were calling Marcus' I said. 'He was trying to read the `Tractatus' of Wittgenstein, but they kept interrupting him'. `Sounds like him' said the despairing man, 'I was to meet him here at half past ten'. `And you've been standing here in the rain all this time? Come in at once and have something to drink'. To the look of despair he added a look of real horror. `I am a member of the Alpine and of the Climbers' Clubs' he said; 'I never drink in the middle of the day. We try to keep ourselves reasonably fit'. I bowed, silently. It seemed to be the only thing to do. `You'd have seen Marcus at breakfast, if he'd been there, wouldn't you, don't you think?' the despairing man said, almost to himself. It was clear to me from his constructions that he, at least, had not, spent the previous evening reading the `Tractatus', or even the 'Philosophical Investigations' of Herr Wittgenstein, but it was my turn for the look of despair and horror.

`I never eat breakfast,' I said, 'I'm never well enough.' That man seemed not to like being with me. 'I think I'll go inside,' he said, and I stood alone with my problem in the heart of Welsh Wales. I could see no way round it; I would have to go for a walk of some kind. It had been on the tip of the despairing man's tongue to ask me to go climbing with him. I had only saved myself with my inspiration about breakfast. I embarked upon my journey. I still had no thought of Beddgelert. I don't suppose that I had, in those days, ever heard of it as more than 'a place'. But there was, as there still is, in a much altered form, a High Road and a Low Road for part of the way in which I was, merely by chance, going. I stood at the junction (there was no gateway then), took a pull at my pocket flask and considered matters. A blonde woman in Scandinavian costume who was standing beside me began to sing `Solveig's Song' from Peer Gynt.

As I turned to seek her advice she disappeared. There was a lot of loose gravel on the Low Road, and a little bird with a white rump was hopping about. It frightened me rather, and I set out along the High Road.

There was very little traffic on that road in those days, and it had not been straightened out anywhere. But there was a blinding flash every five or six minutes as a motor bicycle or motor car skidded upon me round unsuspected corners. There was an Admiral of the Fleet in full dress uniform walking beside me, making a rather curious clanking noise with his sword. I asked him if he thought our situation dangerous, but he didn't reply. I asked him if he would like a sip out of my flask, but he had vanished. Some time later I reached a Post Office in a place they told me was called Nantgwynant.

I enquired for licensed premises and was told that Beddgelert was my first hope, but that 'they might be closed by the time you get there'. I sat down by the roadside and opened my sandwich packet. Everything was made from cheese and onions. One of the misty people all round me said something that sounded like lucus a non lucendo', but I didn't know what he or she meant and just threw the sandwiches away and emptied my flask. It seemed wasteful in my desperate circumstances to pour a libation for the gods, and I did not. I struggled towards Beddgelert. It was a long journey, but I thought I could do it. I remembered dreamily that the night before someone had been talking about a man called Carr who used to stay in Beddgelert and run over Snowdon every morning, with a bicycle on his shoulders, on his way to a mountain called Tryfan. 'It's quicker that way', he is alleged to have said.

I supposed that was why I was without conscious design, now on the way to Beddgelert, and moreover, with an empty flask. I began to recite aloud the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, but when I came to the bit about measuring out my life with coffee spoons an Australian Aboriginal, who kept throwing a boomerang across my head, and snatching at it with his left hand as it came back, asked me to shut up. `You need concentration for what I'm trying to do,' he said. I made for the public house where Mr. Borrow was said to have spent a night or two on one of his missionary journeys, reaching it as the rain stopped. You could say I was wet. They told me the bar was closed, and that, at that time of year they seldom bothered to open it during the week until 'going on seven.' The barmaid was knitting a strange looking tube from a huge ball of grey wool. 'Nice not to see climbers,' she said, `If you and I were locked in the snug no one would know, isn't it?

'Not a soul', I said. We drank a bottle of gin together in the snug and quite soon the Australian went away and I was alone with her. Just before six o'clock I asked her if she thought a determined man with a .32 Mauser pistol could blow the lock off the snug door. 'You had better be getting back, isn't it'? she said. We embraced, a brother and sister in extremis. Perhaps there was a cousinly touch to the final kiss as she slipped a half-bottle into my pocket and kept the change.

'Don't let them put you into one of those places, bach,' she said. 'I've a book to finish,' I told her, stiffly, and set off on my return journey. "You’re going to find this bit difficult, cobber", the Australian said. He'd been waiting for me outside, together with a man from a circus who had a herd of camels with him. I put my face towards Nantgwynant. I woke up just before it was full dark. I think I had rested, with a book, because, as I opened my eyes, a little man in a pink hat closed 'Esmond' for me and dropped it into my book bag. As I reached the hotel the guests were just coming out from dinner and the landlord's wife called out to me, 'Oh, there you are: You're just in time if you hurry up and change'.

'You look ever so much better.' In those days I preferred dining alone, and I gave any loitering diners all the time they needed. There was never a crowd in the early fifties, just a few climbers. When I reached the dining room the Wittgenstein man was sitting by himself reading, and absent-mindedly picking at a plate of Welsh mutton. 'Do you happen to know any German'? he asked me, 'I'm trying to re-write and re-translate a rather bad piece for the Alpine Journal.' I did once, long ago,' I told him, "But where the number 2 bus used to stop they've set up a kind of jungle with orang-utangs hung on the trees."

I must have spoken all Kastner's piece from `'Emil' in German because I heard myself saying Orang-Utans hingen in den zweigen and the Wittgenstein man stood up and held out his hand. 'Please don't bother' he said, 'my name is Marcus, and I'm a doctor. What you need is a nice long rest.'

I go to that hotel rather a lot, now, and the other night a woman guest said, 'Don't you ever drink anything except tonic water'? 'Oh, yes' I told her, 'at Christmas time and Easter I quite often have a bitter lemon, or something like that. You see I'm a member of the Alpine Club, and the Climbers' Club, and we have to try and keep fit.' Then I went up to bed. There was a book up there waiting for me called 'Rock Climbing in the English Lake District' and I was longing to read it for the twentieth time, and to look again at the lovely photographs taken by the Abraham Brothers of Keswick eighty years ago.

Kevin Fitzgerald: Published in Mountain Life Dec/Jan 1975

I was getting down to work when a voice came on the telephone, strongly Lancashire and alive with excitement. I won’t try to put it in dialect.
“Tom, it’s Stan Bradshaw. I’ve been at the Munros on my own for a week. It’s been marvellous. Yesterday I was above the clouds, at 3000 feet in the sun with nothing but mist all round. I’ve done nineteen Munro tops, and I want to make it 20. How about joining me for Ben Challum tomorrow? It’s my last day. Can you make it?”

Before such enthusiasm what can you say? Especially when the man is Stan, whom I met for the first time on the Cuillin ridge a year ago. On that occasion I had watched Stan and his friend Frank Milner pick their way down Bidein Druim nan Ramh on their way to finishing the whole Cuillin Ridge in a single day. But alas, they had failed on the Bhasteir Tooth, and thirty-one hours from setting out they were back at their Loch Coruisk base.

By any standard that was a good attempt. I drove north to meet him, because he went back to the Cuillin last June and I wanted to hear the story of his triumph. Stan is 63, and wonders if he is the oldest man to have done it? Small, bald-headed, light and wiry, he had the coffee boiling when I arrived on him at breakfast-time for Ben Challum. During our climb he told me all about the most wonderful day of his life, beginning at 3.30 a.m. in Glen Brittle and finishing at Sligachan at 11 p.m.

“It was perfect, except for taking a third man along who slowed up Frank and me. But he gave up halfway, and we got moving then. We had a cache of food planted at the Inaccessible Pinnacle, and once we got it we felt sure nothing could stop us. We were tired when we got to the Bhasteir Tooth, and once again we couldn’t find the route, although we had made a reconnaissance in advance. We wasted a bit of time and energy, but once we were up we could relax, for we knew that nothing could stop us getting to Sgurr nan Gillean. It was beautiful! Everything about was grand—the colours, the sea and, swinging away from us, the marvellous ridge and the corries we had traversed.”

The Cullins painted by William Mervyn Glass
Telling the tale to me as we climbed, I noticed that he never seemed to pause for breath as the top of Ben Challum came nearer and nearer. I had never thought of it as an exciting hill, but Stan grew excited as the corrie opened up and a whirling flock of thirty ptarmigan crossed in front of us, white as doves. The cause of the alarm was immediately apparent, when over the ridge came an eagle, its broad wings beating as it crossed our flank.
Strangely, there was a flock of twites up here, too, despite the frozen ground and the cold wind that made us put up our anorak hoods. It was fine to get into the lee of the cairn and have a cup of hot soup and a jam butty while watching the moving black clouds obliterate peaks, or pass and reveal winking eyes of lochans, one of them pin-pointing our route of descent by the south corrie.

Nice to jog down the rocky corrie sweeping down to Lochan Dubh and listen to Stan telling me of his lifestyle as a tripe manufacturer, cross-country runner, fell-racer and hill-walker. He told me how the building up of his business hadn’t left him any time for climbing until he was 40, but that he had always been a harrier.

“I do four miles every day before breakfast in any weather. And I run six miles every evening after work, before tea. I’ll run six miles tonight, and I’ve done so every day since I’ve been up here. After coming back from the hill I have a cup of tea, then go out for my run and come back to a big meal I eat a lot.”
In fact, I did not know what a remarkable individual Stan was until I talked to his Cuillin companion, Frank Milner. Stan, it seems, is a legend in his own country, having at the age of 48 knocked a little off the time taken by Bob Graham to round 42 Lakeland summits in 24 hours, a record which stood for 28 years until Alan Heaten did the second round. Stan was the third man to do it.
Another of his feats was a winter run of 120 miles and 20,000 feet of up and down work to link the two highest pubs in England, Tan Hill in Yorkshire and the Cat and Fiddle in Cheshire.

Doing this with a couple of friends, they took only 51 hours and 49 minutes, without sleep, in rain, snow, mist, hail, thunder and lightning. They set out on Boxing Day. Stan has also done all the summits over 2500 feet in Lakeland in a continuous walk, 105 miles of ascent and 77 summits, all between Saturday morning and Tuesday morning.

Ah, well, it is encouraging to meet a driving force like Stan, who doesn’t know where to stop and who refuses to grow up or grow old. I went to the funeral of another man of that kind a few weeks ago, Dr J. H. B. Bell, with whom I had the pleasure of climbing in 1968 when he was in his seventies, yet he was doing the Munros for the second time and planning to go to the Alps that summer.

Bell was an Auchtermuchty man, chemist, scholar and editor of The Scottish Mountaineering Club Journal. He was one of the big names in British climbing between the wars. Small and lightly built, like Stan Bradshaw, Bell at the age of around fifty pioneered some of the hardest climbs ever done on Ben Nevis. The Orion routes on the North-East Buttress will be amongst the finest of the Scottish classic routes for situation and difficulty.

Now he is dead, a great character gone, while Stan Bradshaw is off to the Canaries to climb a volcano in Tenerife. The great thing about life is to live it to the full when you have the chance. It’s the best recipe for happiness.

Tom Weir

Stan Bradshaw Guardian obituary

We were becoming accustomed to being here on the wall. We didn't look towards the end of the climb or torture ourselves with thoughts of hot showers, beer and those soft warm beds where you don't wear boots, mittens or balaclavas. The furthest we allowed ourselves to look ahead was to the next bivouac and the only pleasures we promised ourselves were steaming mugs of soup in the evening and a warm mug of thick cocoa before the long, long night. We reached the Hinterstoisser, that improbable traverse which leads into the cauldron of the middle of the Face. Thankfully there were some ropes in place, but they were old and Dick eased himself nervously across the last twenty feet clinging to the frayed cores of two sheath-less lines.

Two and a half days to the Swallows Nest, where we'd bivouaced in summer after only a few hours scramble. The niche was lost in the snow and we tip-toed past it on to the first icefield. But we had been spotted and when a helicopter came hovering in we realised that we were the performers in a gigantic arena for the leisurely tourists to watch from the hotel or stare at from the helicopter. They were like spectators at a film and we were the film: we felt as a fly must when it sees people staring at it and tantalising it — failing to appreciate that it is involved very privately in its own affairs. The helicopter hung there droning as I tried to lead the Ice Hose. I waited, unable to concentrate on the steep runnel of ice, and unwilling to provide the spectacle for which all mountain spectators long — the fall.

Eventually the helicopter disappeared and we used axe and crampons on ground up which we had climbed in the darkness during the summer. There were bands of ice across the limestone slabs below the Second Ice Field, so I tried to lead in crampons but they refused to hold on the rock. I tried again without crampons but the ice was in the wrong place so I put them on again and tried to one side. It still wouldn't go: the enormity of that colossal wall was squashing me. 'I can't do it Dick,' I shouted down, a depressing admission of defeat. 'Have you tried without your sack,' I hung the sack on a peg and moved further left. There was a slab at chest height with bands of ice an inch thick across it. I had to stand up on these ice bands. Would they hold? Gingerly I got the picks of my axe and hammer into the ice band above — feeling the rock beneath them. I pulled up and cramponed onto the slab. My foot slipped. The axe and hammer held. I placed the crampon on the rock again — and again it slipped — and as I fell off balance the hammer started to twist from the ice.

Steepening ground below the difficult crack

I pressed it in desperately and trying to pull up on it at the same time I lunged upwards with my crampon into the ice beside the axe. By a fierce contortion I struggled upright and into balance. I was exhausted: my nerves were shattered, my brain squeezed and I was ready for a rest. Another day drew to a close and I felt it was a miracle that we were still there. In the dark we found a place to bivouac and spent an hour carving out a ledge, out it was worthwhile. We cooked and shuffled around to find the optimum comfort. As on other nights I struggled with drowsiness to look for the twinkling constellations wishing I knew more about them, but usually fatigue won and sleep, that great balm, soon took over. As usual we woke at 4 a.m. in order to utilise every moment of daylight. I had a little wrist alarm which used to buzz in case we overslept. It took an hour to prepare and eat breakfast, another half hour to get ready and a further twenty minutes to fight through the layers of clothing, velcro, flaps and zips to pay the morning call.

It was 6.00 in the morning of the fourth day that Dick led onto the Second Ice Field, and I was glad it was him. Sure, it's only ice and not steep — but it was black unfriendly ice and there was a thousand feet of it. No excitement, just up and across, foot by foot, a thousand steps, crampon points hardly biting, axes holding — but the hammer pick not at all, and knuckles bruised and fingers lacerated from the constant hammering. And then late in the day some variation as we climbed off the Ice Field on to the Flat Iron up steep rock broken by overhangs. It was my lead and I left my sack behind and teetered up first in crampons and then without, clawing at the rock with numb and painful fingers which stuck to each peg or karabiner as I touched it. It was cold. It was also difficult and I felt like a hero when I pulled up over the top. By now we were tired after four days on the wall and our sacks were still enormous. There were other excuses too for stopping on the crest of the Flat Iron before reacing the Death Bivouac. We had planned to eat most of our food here to lighten the loads and to make a rapid push the following morning towards the Exit Cracks —and — faint hope —the summit. The idea was sound but grey trails of cloud were sliding across the sky with the dusk and we rethought the whole plan. If the weather was going to turn bad we would need every ounce of food we were carrying to survive. We slept in the bivouac sack that night impatient for the morning and the chance to start moving again and make a few more feet towards the summit — a few feet less to climb should the weather break.

Each one of us kept stealing secret glances outside throughout the night to look at the cloudy sky and wonder. If it broke should we go down or go up? We knew that once past the Death Bivouac we would have passed what is usually the point of no return. But the weather held and so to the Third Ice Field, like black glass which splintered when you kicked it, and then on to the Ramp, the first of the big uncertainties. The Ramp looks so short from the meadows below the Face, but rope lengths came and went and we seemed to get no higher. Some pitches were difficult but the Waterfall Chimney which we had dreaded was dry and free from ice. A welcome bonus. The Rib Pitch too was clean, but when I came to follow Dick up it powder snow had fallen onto the holds, and where I had balanced easily in summer I was forced to struggle with cracked and senseless fingers. That day we only managed the Third Icefield and the Ramp. The fifth bivouac was the worst so far, a mere seat smashed out of the ice amid loose blocks, a perch for the night on the shattered ledges. But at least we could now anticipate reaching the summit eventually and we mentioned beer for the first time. I remembered it was Saturday the 1st of March and my first climbing partner was getting married. I'd had to write to say I couldn't make it.

My sack hung from a peg beside me and I wedged my head behind it to stop myself falling forwards. I dreamt there was a policeman booking me, 'Hello officer, what's this for? "I'm booking you for driving a piton down this groove."But officer I didn't know anyone else knew about this groove."I often drive down this way myself' I woke to find that Dick was lying with his head in my lap and his feet somehow lodged behind a rock. 'You don't mind?''No, it's okay.' And now it was Sunday and we climbed the steep pitch up to the Traverse of the Gods in the semi-darkness before the dawn. I felt a little shaky, my nerves were probably bad from the epic on the icy slabs, or maybe our rigid crampons weren't ideal on this mixed ground, so I edged gingerly along the traverse back into the heart of the Face —the White Spider. But black would have been an apter adjective, for the ice was the worst yet and the steepest we had come across and unfortunately it fell to me to scrape and claw my way up it in the lead. The climbing required no technique: it was kick like hell and smash in the picks of the axe and the hammer, meanwhile glancing down to see of the crampon front points had gone in as much as a quarter-inch.

Every blow seemed more to smash my knuckles than improve my balance. An old rope hung down to my right and I reached it and guiltily rejoiced in using its security as a handrail for fifty feet. But then I had to leave it and wished I had never felt the security. I longed to make some excuse for handing over the lead to Dick in this terrible place. By the time we reached the Exit Cracks our fingers were bleeding, really painfully cracked and raw in the cold. How can ice, which is merely a smooth slope, cause such trouble? All I know is that every time I look back on the photographs of those dark inhospitable slopes the shudders run back down my spine. It seemed unbelievable that the end was nearly in sight. The Exit Cracks are not easy but at least they are the final obstacle. A boss of snow that guarded the base of the Quartz Crack collapsed as Dick led over it. I was afraid he was off, but he managed to hold on and climbed up leftward into the sunlight which was playing on the upper rocks of the Face.

It was the first sun we had been in for days and we were soon warm and revelling in the knowledge that there were now only hundreds of feet instead of thousands to the final slopes. But the rock was terrible, it was shattered and treacherous, interspersed with snow patches and with worthless belays. The wind was increasing as the dusk came in and there was no chance of a classic sunset photo, clouds closed round the summit and powder snow began to blow. We searched hurriedly for a bivouac ledge for dark is on you suddenly in winter and we had no alternative but to bivouac in this forlorn spot. Of an instant the wind was ferocious with driving snow everywhere and we began to loose equipment in the drifting powder. There was no time for anything except to pull the bivouac tent over ourselves and huddle together with the gale battering and shaking the tent in its fury. It was a rough night, at first we crouched over the stove and slowly suffocated from its fumes and when we had eaten we wriggled one at a time into our sleeping bags, boots and all, while the air quickly chilled now that cooking had finished.

Ice formed round our beards and over the inside of the tent only to shake off and fall like snow as the nylon flapped furiously in the relentless wind. Our fingers, so cracked and festering, began to hurt and a little voice in my mind kept whispering 'You've done it, you've done it.' But I refused to listen. I had no wish to be deceived and I determined not to relax until I could step into the hotel bar and order beer with nothing more to worry about than the time of the next train. There was no farewell breakfast and no reluctance to leave that last perch at the top of the wall. We just packed up quickly and felt underservedly favoured to look down and see the fresh snow splattered on those last few pitches of loose and unnerving rubble up which we had teetered so delicately yesterday. Now the steep and comfortingly blue ice of the Summit Ice Field led to the final ridge, although our promised views of the great Oberland peaks on the far side were stolen from us by the swirling cloud. A sharp crest ran up to the summit and it would have been an exhilarating gangway had we not been pushed and tugged by the wind all the way along it.

Dick was there first. It was eight o'clock on the morning of Monday 3rd March — just six days after leaving the railway station below the Face. He just flopped down and pulled in the coils of rope. Sometimes a summit can be an anticlimax —the uncertain anticipation of the upward climb is no more. The blasts of winds and the stinging driven snow drove off such self indulgent thoughts as we faced inwards and slid, shuffled and scrabbled on our front points over ice, snow plastered rock and through pouring streams of avalanching spindrift down the West Flank. From one place we were able to look back into the North Face and we could see nothing but a cauldron of grey mist.

And so we went on down, hour after hour, still tense and watchful until we reached the snow covered meadows and plodded towards the hotel. There was a waiting group of people but inside were welcome drinks and food that all you did was pay for. There were English papers too with headlines about a London Tube disaster and there was a juke box with some character singing 'I've got two strong arms, I can help.'....... It was another world.

Joe Tasker

First published in Mountain Life June/July 1975.

The Ox: Joe Brown and Pete Cargill get a lift from Slim Sorrell.Photo-G Kitchen Collection.

There'll never be another Slim Sorrell. Powerful climber and instructor, Gritstone and Cloggy pioneer, founder member of the Rock and Ice and a friend who was always cheerful in the face of adversity—Slim had many qualities. In fact it was the many good sides to his knockabout nature which highlight even more the manner of his death at the age of 47 in a macabre shooting incident at Cardiff. Slim, a hard-up pipe-fitter from Stockport, served his climbing apprenticeship in the tough, clinkers and-clothes line Manchester school of the late forties. The mines of Alderley, the barns of Castleton, clashes with the tar-pouring farmer of Windgather, bivvying in all weathers on Kinder and gritstone edges of the Peak. He was one of the early rope-mates of Joe Brown and the two of them joined one of the greatest of all small clubs, the now-defunct Valkyrie from the Derby-Nottingham area.

Nat Allen, Wilf White, Don Chapman, Chuck Cook and Don Cowan were among the leading spirits of The Valk. Slim and Joe joined them in exploring the Froggatt-Curbar escarpment when new routes were ripe for the plucking in those golden days of 1948 and 1949. Joe and Slim produced the impressive Eliminatesand The Peapod and Slim's, name is perpetuated in Sorrell's Sorrow and Sorrallion. Over at Stanage Slim seconded Joe on the first ascent of the Right Unconquerable, one of the classics of grit. And when the 1957 Stanage and Froggatt guide was produced Slim was an obvious man to join the writing team. The Rock and Ice was the natural successor to the Valkyrie Club and in 1951 Slim helped to get it going with Joe and other names which were to become bywords in cragsmanship. Don Whillans, Ron Moseley and the ever-present Nat Allen.

Down in Wales Slim took part in the first ascent of Hangoveron Clogwyn y Grochan and Diglyph and Octo on Cloggy. Joe led all three and Slim- ever-resourceful- seconded part of Diglyph by swarming up a knotted rope when the climbing became too technical even for him. My happiest memories of Slim are of those halcyon days when the Rock and Ice bivvied under Stanage or Froggatt and slept among falling plaster in the ruined farm of Bryn, Coch near the Snowdon railway. After a hard day on the crags Whillans and Moseley would be competing to see who could do the most press-ups or pull-ups. But it was Slim, with his boyish sense of fun, who invented the wilder games. When he tired of wrestling (having won all the bouts) he would organise a stone-throwing battle up and down the Llanberis Pass, an eating competition, or just a plain sleeping-bag fight.

Stories about Slim are legion. Once while bivvying on Dovestones in the Peak one wintry weekend he threw away the sheep's heart which was part of his ration. Next week the inseparable Brown and Sorrell were there again. Running out of food, Slim went to search for his sheep's heart, found it preserved in the snow and cooked and ate it! One raw, foggy day Brown was demonstrating the Cave Crack at Froggatt. Climbing in nails he moved out under the overhang, grasped the knob which was the key to the climb and pulled up into the jamming crack. When he was belayed Slim, a heavily-built character, began to follow him up. All went well until he came to the pull-up, when his hand slipped off the wet rock and he fell backwards. The rope broke and the horrified onlookers saw him plunge head first among the sharp boulders.

Brown descended with incredible speed and everybody ran to help what they assumed to be the injured climber. But Slim had fallen luckily and his main concern seemed to be the rope. He and Brown tested it with their hands . . . and once again it snapped. "My God," mumbled Slim, "to think we were using that rope on Cloggy last weekend!" Eventually the burly Slim became Constable Merrick Thomas Sorrell of Stockport Police. (Only his wife Dot ever gave him his Sunday name of Merrick among our gang). He won many commendations from his chief for when it came to chasing and apprehending, no thug or thief was any match for Slim. While on point duty in the centre of Stockport Slim would mischievously hold up four lines of hooting traffic while he strode across to a Stanage bound car and discussed the latest routes.

One of his jokes while in uniform was to grab one of his climbing friends in a Stockport street. Only after a curious crowd had gathered, thinking they were watching a smart arrest, would Slim let the victim go. After 13 years in the police Slim became an instructor at Ullswater Outward Bound School in the Lakes and later at Ashburton Outward Bound School in Devon. Slim put a brave face on one of the great tragedies of his life. His wife Dot had been one of the most adhesive woman climbers in the Peak. She is pictured leading Allen's Slab on Froggatt in the 1957 guide, and Dorothy's Dilemma on the Roaches is named after the problems she had in seconding the first ascent.

But she caught polio and became an invalid. Eventually the marriage ended in divorce. Then,while they were doing Gillercombe Buttress above Borrowdale in 1972, Slim's instructor companion fell to his death. Slim eventually married his friend's widow and suffered a certain amount of innuendo in the Press. He was shot dead at a Cardiff college- ironically while 120 police constables were sitting an examination nearby. Slim's death shocked the members of the Northern climbing fraternity-particularly Joe Brown (Slim was best man at his wedding) and his former friends of the Valk and Rock and Ice. We cherish the Memory of one of the great characters of the crags.

Tom Waghorn: First published in Climber and Rambler Jan 1976

Sandwood Bay: Photo JMT

Gwen Moffat: First published in High-Dec 1985

Six year old Luke's first climb.The Coves,Knapdale,Scotland.

The following essay was recently re-discovered literally in the bottom of a drawer amongst various unpublished essays,journal extracts and poems. It recalls a magical week on the west coast of Scotland with some of my children and a family friend with her two offsprings. Despite the prose at times reading as purple as a Wino's nose and occasionally straying into 'Swallows and Amazons' territory, it nevertheless, captures-I hope- a special time in a special place. Staying in the West Wing of a magnificent Georgian house on the shores of West Loch Tarbert on the Knapdale Peninsular.Set amidst the wild coastal countryside which defined the 1500 acre estate. An estate which sadly was quickly falling into disrepair and which would, within a few years, be sold off by the court to settle a complicated family dispute over ownership. Nevertheless, for one week in May it was paradise. The peninsular simmered each day under endless blue skies,mussels were gathered and mullet was hauled. Smoke curled from beach fires and virgin rock was climbed. We would return several times but never again would we quite capture the magic of that first week. Tragically, Debbie my companion that week died all too young three years ago.

Beyond the seal stacked rocks of Rubh'a Bharr Ruaidh,the morning ferry to Islay could be heard. Its fathoming engines breaking the fragile silence that lay over Ardpatrick point. Despite the early morning hour, the sun had ignited an azure sky and promised us another day of simmering shadows amongst the jagged, saltwater shores which corralled the bearded cliffs known locally as 'The Coves'. As climbing parties go, this was an elfin band of eager youngsters and a female friend with a chronic back problem and no climbing experience. However, the coltish spirit of my charges fermented in the warm Highland air and suggested that this would not act as a barrier to our climbing ambitions. Upon this day we would feast our limbs on rock as untainted by human hand as the furthest flung Himalayan peak. The pleasure of unwrapping the sharp cast of unburnished sea cliff, a tactile experience worth a thousand polished ascents of an established route.

The touchstone of our experience moulded under the same northern skies which had looked down upon George Orwell as he fought his final battle with TB and struggled to complete '1984' on Jura's mesmeric north eastern shore. I had always found an echo in Orwell's leftist libertarianism. His stubborn romanticism in the face of conventional political sensibilities a heady draught from which to draw inspiration. His 'crystal spirit no power could disinherit' as true now as it ever was.

A wrong turning and a long but ultimately rewarding journey around the peninsular on route to our temporary base, had revealed a crenelated frenzy of sea cliffs and caves which looked out to the salmon dusted islands of Islay, Jura and Gigha. 'The Coves' had never entered climbing folklore as the Gogarth of the north. I am sure that given the lack of scale on this gently woven mid western edge of the Scottish mainland, Patey, Smith, Marshall and Nimlin would have been frying bigger fish to the north and east of this gentle, luminous land of sea and sky. The only ghosts to haunt these quiet shores were the ghosts of fishermen and sailors whose lost lives gilded the rusting lobster pots and caught on the Atlantic winds.

Tumbling from our overloaded Citroen, we fell down through thistle rich fields which spilled into banks of fern and bramble. The rasping tendrils drew blood from Daisy's pale, bare legs; the crimson stains quickly drying in the warm, salted air. Emerging from the verdant groves we tumbled onto the cobbled shores of Porth Mor, which reeked of rotting seaweed. We gradually found the air sweeter as we moved beyond the arc of shore beneath the bramble groves. Slipping and sliding through shifting silver sands and clacking rocks, our raggle-taggle caravan wound its way through the secret rock pools and fingers of sea which reached into hollow channels of pocketed stone cleft by infinite tides.

Amongst the dessicated, blackened ribbons of seaweed, Siobhan stumbled upon three speckled eggs of an Oystercatcher who, upon being disturbed, arced away in alarm and berated us from the haven of a crusted rock half submerged in the crystal waters. In the shadow of a green tower we set down our sweat stained burden of rucsacs and ropes and toasted our arrival with Ki-Ora. As we lay on the pebbles beneath the tower, and out of reach of the rising tide, I contemplated the monolithic feature before us. Although the tower carried a fair amount of vegetation, there was enough clean rock winding down like the polished rail of a helter-skelter to suggest a feasible passage lay through the green sward. As we shook our sacs out, Luke stripped off and took to the aqua green waters beneath the tower, amazed at the shoals of tiny fish which exploded from his shadow. As Luke waded towards the fronded rocks which guarded the pool I anchored Liam to the rock and started to paw the pale stone before rising up on holds which were good and true. After 20ft of easy climbing I tossed a sling over a spike of rock and looked down upon upturned, brown faces, curious to discover if our Lilliputian sea stack ‘would go’ ?

Passing through a grassy section I descended into shadows and grappled with rock which was now steeper and looser than before. Pausing to place a cam, I gingerly crept through the difficulties, taking care not to trust these brittle stone bones with anything more than brief caress. After 90ft of gentle meandering I pulled out onto the virginal tip of 'Oystercatcher Pinnacle'. After passing a sling over a pale boss I tied on and settled back in my heather chair to drink in the day. To the west, the island of Gigha –‘God's Island’- sent its whistling white sands across the sound: Islay sweated; its rich, whisky brown body rolled in the Atlantic surf while Jura's paps drew lustful glances. Within this ultramarine canvas, sail cloth whispered and beyond the dazzling Sound of Jura, the amorphous surge of stone and wood drew out of shadows, fixing its sacred image on my yielding eye.

Oystercatcher Pinnacle.
One by one the youngsters-minus little Luke-clambered up the tower. Debbie delicately picked her way through the shingle bands knotted with driftwood and seaweed to frame photographs and offer encouragement to the brown limbed dancers who would join me in my green eyrie. Daisy, Henry and Liam all found the key to unlock the door; Siobhan let it slip from her delicate white hand and drifted back to earth on a nylon thread to offer her tears to the salted grass. Sometime later she emerged at my shoulder to after a death defying scramble up the back of the sea stack. Expecting my admiration and pleasure at her achievement, I could only of offer a parent’s anger and admonishment for her suicidal ascent. Once more I lowered her tearfully back to earth. The following day reprised the last with regard to the weather. A full blooded sun dazzled down and almost to the minute we found ourselves once again passing through the shadows which fell from our now vanquished tower.

The previous day I had reconnoitered the southern reaches of the coves and spied a delightful looking ridge which arched out of the sea like a gilded scallop shell the spine of which was pitted with stone honeycombs. When I pointed out this obscure object of desire it was unanimously met by the approval of all concerned. ‘Honeycomb Ridge’ began as a lovely rough slab which ran up to meet the main body of the ridge. The ridge itself unfolded as a delightful dance over a rough, bleached cockscomb which sprang out of the sea to meet the heathery headland above. Technically little more than a scramble, nevertheless, the plunging exposure that was experienced once the ridge was gained shook Debbie's knees to jelly -it was her first ever climb- and prompted Daisy to curse Liam and Henry with the tongue of a stout soaked navvy when they attempted ill advised criticisms of her elegant climbing style! Siobhan put the disappointment of the previous day behind her and whooped with pleasure as she pulled up beside me.

Honeycomb Ridge
When we got down I geared Luke up and gave him a taste of rock with some little rites of passage over the lichen crusted rocks beneath the ridge. He grappled manfully with the task in hand, his scuffed trainers scraping the rock while tiny fingers coiled around sharp flakes. Reserving his smiles for later, his concentration was total and his expression showing his serious commitment as fingers danced over rock; feeling for holds unseen by naked eyes. Whether you are poised beneath 'the pudding stone' on Cenotaph Corner, or six feet above the shingle of Rubha Cruitiridh-five years from heaven or seventy five-this is it; the slow dance which all who climb experience. The steps once learnt never forgotten.

With most of the party content with the day's haul, Liam Henry and I left the rest of the party to beach comb whilst we wended our way further down the shore where the final climb of the day waited for us. Before I left base camp I wrapped one of the girl's swimming costumes around my velveteen head in a belated attempt to protect my burnt crown. Indifferent to the mocking sniggers of these disrespectful shavelings. ‘Yellow Buoy Climb’ bookended the Coves climbs. A 'severe' climb which started out as a wonderful slab which breached an overlap halfway and ended as a desperate struggle up a crumbling chimney which resembled poorly mixed concrete.For the first time in two days I contemplated the possibility of taking flight from the rock as I struggled to place protection in this nerve wracking chicane of sun dried merde!

Below and indifferent to my struggle, Debbie dozed on the melting rocks lapped by languorous waves. Occasionally she framed an action shot for posterity before retreating back into the warm arms of the sun. Eighty feet above the brown skinned boys of summer I tried to alleviate my anxiety by singing 'Mull of Kintyre'. McCartney's paean to these sacred western shores of Argyll worked its magic and soon my scratched, dusted hands grasped a sharp, solid edge and with one bound he was free ! As I brought up Liam and Henry, Luke and the girls wandered up to catch the action before retreating back with Debbie along the shore to strike camp.

As the earth began to turn its back on the sun, Luke and I followed the ragged caravan back through the headlands, stopping at a freshwater waterfall to dip our heads and cup the peat scented nectar to our lips. Feeling our way through the eye deep bramble and fern banks I scrambled above the rasping tendrils onto a boulder and pulled Luke up beside me to look back upon the canvas we had painted that day. Gigha sank back and pulled the little island of Cara into its shadow. Islay and Jura shimmered in the gloaming as blood red fingers of cloud parted the temporal sky. In the field beyond the crooked stone wall which divided us, a farmer shouldered a lifeless lamb through his thistle studded field before tossing his cold burden into the boot of his Ford Escort van. All around us, in quiet rapture, this fine may day began its procession into night. Our sojourn in her season a blessed vacation from the dark winter we had experienced in the south.

Dunskeig could be seen across the loch from the ferry cottages beneath Ardpatrick. A rounded hump fringed with rough,untamed woodland from which pale steep cliffs rose above the dark hem which looked out over the entrance to West Loch Tarbert like the Gates of Troy. The cliffs could have been anything from 30 to 100 ft in height. From a mile away across the loch it was difficult to tell but rock is rock and we had our curiosity to satisfy.

The approach to Dunskeig involved either a twenty mile car journey around the loch or, more simply, a water bourn approach across the mile wide loch. The latter being no quicker but certainly, given the beautiful location, a more romantic approach to a crag you could not dream of. Liam, Henry and I stashed our climbing gear in the stern or our pea green boat and maneuvered her down the slipway, taking care not to tumble on the polished, seaweed coated rocks. With the launching trolly wheels submerged, the tiny craft floated free.

After dragging it clear of submerged rocks I threw in the line and scrambled aboard. Liam and Henry took an oar each whilst I made myself comfortable in the stern Apart from the occasional fishing boat returning to the narrow isthmus which connects Kintyre with the mainland, the loch was quiet and after a pleasant hour our little craft was pulled ashore in a craggy inlet. After dragging her clear of the tide we wound our way through the alder and birch groves which were rooted in a dark, wet, peat bog and emerged into sunlight on the heather slopes of the hill. It was clear that the cliffs of Dunskeig did not have the scale or quality we had anticipated. Little more than 50ft high and clothed in a luxuriant growth of lichen, I pondered the possible lines and settled for a feasible line which began from a sharp corner. Groove and Slab began as lovely ascent of a fine steep corner. Beneath the lichen was rock as sharp and firm as you could wish for. After 20’ of climbing, an awkward pull on to a narrow ledge allowed a pause in the proceedings and a glance to right revealed a nice slabby finish. The final slab was delicate in places and required some conscientious gardening, but despite the lack of protection the line never felt serious.

The only heart shaking moment came when as I pulled through the final crack and a salvo of sound exploded from within the deep, dark confines of the crack. It appeared that the fissure was home to a nest of hungry young gulls. I expect they were as shocked as I when, for a brief moment in time,our worlds collided! We decided to pick out one more climb before rowing back home. Red Chimney was just that. A deep chimney of rust red rock which was reached via a short slab. Like its near neighbour, the difficulties never exceeded V Diff but nevertheless it passed off as a pleasant excursion which gave Liam and Henry the chance to practice the lost art of 'back and footing'. Given the time and inclination Dunskeig could cleaned up to provide say 10 short routes but given its inaccessibility and its lack of scale, this lonely fortress is forever destined to remain an echoing haven of seabirds- and who is to argue that this is not how it should be.

The cliffs of Dunskeig above the mouth of West Loch Tarbert

This was to be our last day of exploration on the gentle virgin cliffs of Kintyre and Knapdale. Under a delicate patina of viridian and ochre wisps of lichen lay rock which reflected the honest, unspoiled beauty of the land from which it grew.The cold, dispassionate descriptions of our modest explorations would lie unrecorded save this brief outline of our activities. The soft white page is no place for a rainbow of memories. Memories which nourish the soul in times of hunger.

There are places I'll remember,All my life, though some have changed
Some forever, not for better,Some have gone and some remain.All these places have their moments,With lovers and friends I still can recall.Some are dead and some are living,In my life, I've loved them all.

John Appleby: 1997

Ed Drummond out on a limb at an early event:Photo Ian Smith

When David Craig and I started planning the first festival on our 1987 journey to climb on the sea cliffs of Anglesey in North Wales, we wanted to include some elements that remained central to the experience which I tried to provide at every festival over its 21 years of life. The celebration of new work was the original impulse and perhaps we can be forgiven if some of that new work was our own. Nobody else was going to arrange readings from David's now classic book Native Stones or my first collection of poetry, The Stone Spiral. Being climbers, we were imbued with the spirit of 'just do it!' In the event I only read one poem from my own collection as an introduction to inviting other poets in the audience to read a poem of their own. (Ten years later I could invite David to read from his new book Landmarks, although fear of cries of 'Foul' prevented my programming a reading from my own latest collection, The Rope, even though every poem was a climbing poem.)

We were also aware of the imminent return to England of Ed Drummond and rumours about a book being on the way from him (A Dream of White Horses), so we invited him to do his poetry reading performance whilst up the pole (actually three poles – a 40ft high tripod with a small platform at the top).

David Craig leading his partner's classic Dexter Wall.
Women's writing about climbing was even rarer in those days than it is now and we wanted to offer encouragement to it, so we invited Marjorie Mortimer to give us what turned out to be an amusing, mocking talk about what she called 'The Mine Is Bigger Than Yours' display in men's climbing writing. We have always had at least one woman speaking at the festival, and memorable contributions they have been, such as Jill Lawrence's feminist analysis of the climate of magazine publishing for women climbers followed by octogenarian Janet Adam Smith saying stridently: "Well, I've never experienced any drawbacks in being a woman." We could quite believe that this was true in Janet's case, if not for her argument in general.

Another memorable combination was that of the late Alison Hargreaves and Alison Osius, Senior Editor at Climbingmagazine (now with Rock & Ice) whilst visiting from the USA to talk about writing profiles of mountaineers. Alison Osius was actually writing what was to be the last interview profile of Alison Hargreaves, a tribute the festival was pleased to have made possible.
We have always felt that the festival should be fun if climbers are giving up a whole Saturday to be talking about it instead of doing it. (This must have been the only festival in the world that prayed for rain.) At our first event Mike Mortimer gave us a quiz to test our knowledge of the literature. This was wittily devised and is published (with the answers, of course) in the book of the festival papers from the first five years, Orogenic Zones, published by Bretton Hall College.

The fourth festival featured a play devised by local school students using a specially erected climbing wall. For one festival, Rosie Smith and Celia Bull revived some of Tom Patey's songs and for another they wrote their own. Among the more bizarre ideas to inject a little fun into the festival was one that arose out of a pub conversation with the then young hotshot, Johnny Dawes, who had just sat his final exams at university and was enthusing about what a buzz they had been. So, when people ordered their tickets for the sixth festival they were invited to set an exam question for Dawes. At the opening of the festival he was given the exam paper of 14 questions from the audience and sent away to write an answer to one of them for a reading three hours later. He chose the question 'My First Time' and duly returned to carry off the reading of his paper with characteristic imagination, wit and flare.

Droll Wall Ascentionist: Climbing humourist Steve Ashton. Photo SA

On two occasions humorist, Steve Ashton, gave theatrical performances that took the audience by surprise. At the 10th festival he was a climber in a mental hospital in conversation with his therapist. This was both very funny and extremely moving at the same time. The fourth element of the first festival that became a cornerstone of our planning was controversy and debate. Dave Cook's lecture at the first festival threw out a challenge to mountaineering literature to be more inclusive (of women, young activists, climbers from minority ethnic groups, foreign literatures), more connected to climbers’ wider lives (as workers, lovers, and political, even musical, creatures) and more expressively experimental in form.

We regularly commissioned new poetry, from septuagenarian Guy Kirkus, the brother of Colin Kirkus, for example, and from the festival's popular discovery, the young feminist climbing poet, Kym Martindale. We also tried to commission new work from younger climbers. Fourteen-year old Chris Briggs, who read his poem 'Doomsville' at the fifth festival, held the record. At the 10th festival, bold young activist, Paul Pritchard, took the audience by storm with his writing about the Llanberis rock-climbing scene with the result that publisher Ken Wilson was not talking about if he was publishing Paul's book, but when he would be publishing Deep Play, which went on to win the Boardman Tasker Award the following year.

Debate was lively each year following the adjudication speech by the Chair of the Boardman Tasker judges. At that time this was the only public opportunity to hear this speech and to hear the winning writer read from his or her book following the press announcement at The Alpine Club in London. By the time the short-list had been announced opinions had formed about what ought to be the winner and views could be aired in the presence of the Boardman and Tasker families who were reminded annually of the seriousness with which this award was coveted by writers and publishers in the audience, to say nothing of the seriousness with which the bibliophiles in the audience held opinions about their reading of the entries. Of course, one ought to say that a specialist bookshop run by Jarvis Books of Matlock, did a good trade in providing books to be signed by writers present for the day. For Grant and Val, great supporters of the festival, Christmas always came early.

Finally, the international dimension, which was begun in a unique and topical manner by Waclaw Sonelski's lecture on 'Climbing in Poland Under Communism', produced a series of authoritative papers on the mountaineering literature of France from Anne Sauvy, and of Italy from Mirella Tenderini. Allen Steck gave us an insight into the secrets of keeping up the innovative standards of Ascent. (Much of this seemed to do with Ascent'shaving its own wine label.) Then, also from the USA, Mikel Vause (famously named by Maggie Body ‘Full Dome’) shared with us his PhD research into mountaineering literature, Of Men and Mountains, and Pete Sinclair, who explored for us his thinking about access to wilderness after writing his book, We Aspired, came back each year simply to sit in the audience because he had found the festival so much fun on his first visit. Singer and storyteller, Sid Marty, also travelled more than once from Canada to amuse the audience with his deadpan wit.

Despite the international stars who talked about their writings like Chris Bonington, Doug Scott, Stephen Venables, Kurt Diemberger, Paul Piana, Doug Robinson, Pat and Biaba Morrow, the show was often been stolen by the old-timers like Tom Weir from Scotland and Charlie Houston and Bob Bates from the USA, or the unexpected discoveries such as Irish storyteller Dermot Somers and retired Hodder and Stoughton editor, Maggie Body. Indeed, the unpredictability of the event was perhaps part of its charm. However, this should not suggest that the organisation itself was unpredictable. We prided ourselves on running an event where things happened on time and, with very little sponsorship income, on keeping ticket prices as low as possible.

A number of people were stalwart supporters of the festival throughout the years. The late and hugely missed Paul Nunn, especially in the early days, lent our discussions his idiosyncratic wisdom and widely respected authority. Jim Curran was always on hand to debunk any pretensions or drop his papers on the floor and reshuffle them for his talk. Ian Smith annually rehearsed his very professional readings from the winners of the Festival/High magazine writing competition. In addition, late in the festival day we opened an exhibition of original mountain paintings as a break from the festival's intense pace. We were delighted to find that the festival could offer hospitality to passing luminaries, such as Harish Kapadia, Editor of The Himalayan Journal, so that they are able to honour the festival with their presence whilst they were attending events elsewhere in the UK.

We found ourselves consulted in the setting up of similar mountain literature festivals in other countries, such as the Banff Mountain Festival in Canada and at Passy in France. New activities started springing up around the festival. A group of women climbing writers who met at the festival each year began running a weekend writing workshop prior to the festival. Their occasional publication, Women, Mountains, Words, is still appearing and four of those women have produced their own books at the last count. We were able, as a result of the generosity of the Paul Nunn Memorial Fund, to recruit from the USA one of Mikel Vause’s former students, Kaydee Summers, for the Paul Nunn Scholarship to begin a PhD student researching mountaineering literature

When Bretton Hall closed as a campus of Leeds University the festival was welcomed into the arms of the Kendal Mountain Film Festival but a one-day book festival could not find a satisfactory place within a weekend film festival and our traditional loyal audience, faced with too many choices at Kendal, faded away. Twenty one years of running an annual one-day festival seemed like a good time to retire from the job and the festival closed.

Better Red than Read:The late Dave Cook.Photo Ian Smith

Dave Cook's polemical lecture at that first festival had become our manifesto and a standard by which we could evaluate ourselves each year. Dave Cook concluded by quoting the Lake District poet Norman Nicholson with a quotation that is a useful reminder of why we continue writing and reading about our sport:

Mountains should not serve as an escape from reality. They are surely an escape back to reality.

Terry Gifford: First published in Climber and republished by kind permission of the author.

It is after midnight and I have been lying awake for an hour now. It’s not that I don’t want to sleep, but the cold is creeping into my bodyand I feel miserable. The eiderdown in my sleeping bag and the two inches of my air mattress are all that separate me from 27,900 feet of hard, cold, rock. This is just one of the contributing factors adding to my discomfort. Another is that the air is not as dense at this elevation due to reduced atmospheric pressure so it is hard to sustain my mental and physical alertness. To put it more pithily, I feel sluggish.However, the main reason I feel the way I do is because it is bloody cold out – minus 27 degrees Centigrade! I know there is nothing I can do about the temperature, but there is something I can do to lessen the discomfort. However, I either have to suffer some discomfort for another hour and then sleep, or sleep now and suffer later. Lying next to me is a light alloy cylindrical oxygen bottle that has two hours’ worth of oxygen left in it. That is two hours if I adjust the flow rate to one litre per minute, less if I jack up the rate. That doesn’t sound like a whole lot and in reality it isn’t. This odourless, invisible gas which flows out of the bottle through a regulating valve and mask into my lungs, permeates through my body within seconds and warms me up, allowing me to rest comfortably. Unfortunately, there is not enough oxygen in the bottle to get me through the whole night so I have had to turn it off. I decide to wait another hour before turning on the oxygen. This way I can sleep for two hours just before beginning our assault.

Tenzing, who is sleeping on the lower shelf, is no better off than I am in these cold, cramped conditions. His feet are over-hanging the steep slope because the bench he is lying on is too short for his stretched-out body. For his own reason he has decided to sleep with his boots on. They are not the high-altitude boots designed for our British expedition, but the Reindeer boots issued to him by the Swiss last year. I have chosen to take my boots off and use them to prop the toe of my sleeping bag off the ice as my legs are draped across Tenzing in the lower corner of the tent. This thin, flimsy piece of material is the only thing protecting us from the elements, the elements we have no desire to deal with in the dark.

The wind that would begin its violent roar on the ridge above and rapidly descend towards our tent like an agitated swarm of bees returning to their hive after a day of frenzied honey collecting has finally abated and it is now calm and quiet. I no longer need to use my body as a brace against the fabric of the tent.

As predicted, I awake at 4 a.m. when my oxygen supply runs out. A quick peek out the tent door reveals an inky black sky above, but down below the peaks are beginning to glow in the early dawn. Fifteen thousand feet below us Tenzing points out Tengboche Monastery, a sight that he believes is a good omen. I sure hope so! As I recheck the oxygensets, Tenzing fires up the Primus and we begin consuming large quantities of lemon juice and sugar. One of the detrimental side effects of climbing at high altitude is the loss of appetite and thirst, but I force myself to at least drink.

A major concern of mine is my frozen boots. I reprimand myself for not leaving them on in my sleeping bag as I cook them over the Primus stove. Despite the acrid smell of scorched leather that permeates the tent I manage to soften them up enough to get my cold feet into them.

We don every piece of attire we have with us, including our precious down clothing and wind proofs, and our gloves – all three pairs. Tenzing is also wearing the red scarf given to him by Raymond Lambert, and Earl Denman’s balaclava. I check my camera and set the aperture now so that I don’t have to do it later. One less thing to worry about if we reach the summit! At 6:30 a.m. we crawl out of the tent. Our first task is to strap our crampons onto our boots. Although a simple task at lower elevations, I feel like a farrier who has struggled to attach horseshoes onto the hooves of a Clydesdale. Finally, I set both our oxygen gauges at three litres per minute instead of four as we had planned. I know that by doing this we will be breathing less oxygen, but the bottles will last longer and hopefully get us further up the mountain before we need to change them.

As I tie onto the rope my mind wanders and I remember today is May 29, the 150^th day of the year. A rather ordinary day, but I am reminded of my Sunday school teacher in Auckland who talked about Psalm 150 from the Old Testament. It is the last psalm in the Book of Psalms. In it the writer urges the congregation to praise God with music and dancing. Although I am not going to sing, I feel my first step of the day towards the summit is my way of praising God, either my Christian God or Chomolungma, the Tibetan Mother Goddess of the Earth. I slowly lift my right foot and let it sink into the snow. My crampons bite into the ice below and I automatically move my left foot up. My dance has begun!

I decide to let Tenzing lead as my feet still feel cold and I feel a little unstable. From our tent we need to angle up a bulge back towards the Southeast Ridge. It’s not very far but the traverse allows us to set a rhythm with our breathing and stride. The lower angle of the climb means we don’t need to breathe too hard. ‘Breathe too hard,’ that’s a joke! I take one step, which is an effort, and then pant for 20 seconds before taking a second step. Although Tenzing is shorter than me and his legs aren’t as long, I am not chaffing at the bit behind him. The length of my stride is usually longer, but because of the effort to lift my legs, my step is shorter and therefore I comfortably fall into stride behind him. Gradually my feet begin to tingle, a sure sign that blood is reaching my extremities and warming up my toes alleviating my concern about frostbite.

On top of the bulge, the South Summit towers a further 500 feet above us. It looks so close, but I know it will take us another two hours to reach it. Angling out to the right from the South Summit are great menacing cornices overhanging the Kangshung Face which lead to the main summit somewhere beyond. I now take over the lead and arrive at a sharp narrow ridge. I avoid the sheer ice on the right and head to the left where it looks more manageable. Here I find a breakable crust, the bane of mountaineers. The snow holds my weight for a few seconds, giving me a false sense of security, then shatters beneath my boot causing me to lurch forward knee deep in powder snow. In spite of this, I feel I am moving well and persist in these trying conditions for another half an hour. We cross a little bump in the ridge and there lying in a hollow are the two oxygenbottles left by Charles Evans and Tom Bourdillon. I wipe the snow off the dials and see that they are just under a third full. By my calculations we should be able to get to the top and back to here with the oxygenwe are carrying. We will be able to use these bottles to continue the descent.

Above us a 400 foot snow slope rises steeply towards the South Summit. Tenzing and I now alternate the lead. A thin skin of ice covers deep snow and my fears are heightened when a six foot wide piece of ice shatters around me and begins sliding down the mountain. I stumble backwards but remain on my feet and watch the ice as it continues to gather speed and slides down out of view. I feel my heart rate increase, but take a couple of deep breaths and pause for a minute to calm myself before moving on. I am aware of the precarious conditions and know that we need to be cautious.

At 9 a.m. we emerge on the South Summit and look for signs of footprints. Three days ago our teammates reached this point, the highest anyone has been on this route. I sense their spirit is with us now, urging us on. They, and the rest of the team, have contributed to getting Tenzing and me to this point. Without the team and the gradual build up over the last months, weeks and days, we would not be standing on the South Summit where our ultimate goal of reaching the top of Mount Everest is now within our grasp.

Tenzing pulls his water bottle out and we take a drink of sweetened lemon juice and I check our oxygensupplies. Both our bottles are almost empty so to save weight I remove them and hook-up our full bottles. I take care to make sure they are securely attached and that there are no leaks in the system. We have roughly four and a half hours of oxygento get us to the top and back down to the bottles we found and don’t want to be cheated by faulty connections.

With a growing sense of excitement I move down from the South Summit to the small saddle at the start of the final summit ridge, the ridge we saw from below with the great menacing cornices. We are now in uncharted territory. When I talked with Tom and Charles at the South Col after their attempt, they could only speculate about what conditions would be like for us and what we could expect, but now we are literally ‘rubbing our noses’ in it. I lead on for 40 feet cutting steps then I plunge my ice axe into the firm snow and belay Tenzing up. Tenzing then leads off and does the same. We continue in this manner until we reach the base of a great rock step. I had seen this imposing feature from the South Summit and knew that it might prove to be a major hurdle, but I focused on the task at hand to get us to its bottom without dwelling on it. It is very easy for the mind to play games when the brain is not functioning at full capacity due to low oxygen; therefore I want to deal with one step at a time.

At nearly 29,000 feet I am confronted by a sheer rock wall that appears unclimbable. However, looking out to the right I can see what looks like a possible route. Overhanging the precipitous Kangshung Face is a great ice cornice that gravity has pulled away from the rock leaving a narrow crack running up the full length. I nervously wonder if the cornice might collapse under my pressure, but there is only one way to find out. I make sure Tenzing has a solid belay and then ease myself into the crack. Facing the rock, I jam my crampons into the ice behind me and wriggle upwards using any feature I can as a handhold. My breathing is labored and I am puffing hard. The ice is holding, and slowly, inch by inch, I climb the 40 feet and, in a state of exhaustion, pull myself onto the top of the rock step. I lie there panting for a couple of minutes and then slowly arrange a belay to bring Tenzing up. I wave down to him to indicate that I am ready and then he too begins the task of climbing up the fissure. After about 10 minutes he arrives panting next to me. I am now sure the summit isn’t very far away.

I again begin cutting steps in the ice reassured by the fact that the ridge is no longer as steep. I can feel the excitement mounting. I want to go faster. I want to get to the top! Amongst climbers this sensation is commonly referred to as ‘summit fever’. I am in the throes of summit fever, but am tormented by the fact that the ridge appears to go on and on, and all I can do is to continue to move at my snail’s pace.

Ahead of me now is a rounded snowy dome. It must be the summit. Back in 1924 George Mallory and Andrew Irvine were last seen just below the second step on the North Ridge still moving towards the summit when clouds moved in, hiding any further view of their progress. I often wonder if one, or both, of their bodies sit quietly frozen on the summit, but I can now see they do not. Maybe I will find something in the snow they have left behind. With two more steps I move onto a flattish exposed area of snow with nothing but space in all directions. Tenzing steps up beside me. This is it. This is the top. The highest point in the world! The summit of Mount Everest! It is a moment I will never forget. My skin feels charged, electrified, and goosebumps form down the nape of my neck. This pleasant feeling when mixed with my mental state produces a wonderful euphoria. I can feel a huge grin charge across my face. I turn towards Tenzing and reach out with my arm to shake his hand. This is not enough for Tenzing and he throws his arms around my shoulders and gives me a big hug. In this moment I realise that a handshake is too formal, too British. I too reach around my companion and hug him, thumping his back. Even with the oxygen mask on, I can sense his excitement. It is 11:30 a.m. on the 29^thMay, 1953.

I know we can’t stay on top for long, but this moment has to be savoured. I turn off my oxygen and remove my mask. My face is immediately prickled by ice splinters carried by the wind. I reach inside my down jacket and bring out my camera as Tenzing unfurls the four flags wrapped around the shaft of his ice axe: the United Nations flag, the British Union Jack, the Nepalese flag and the Indian flag. I take a photo of Tenzing standing on the summit with the flags flapping in the breeze, then turn to take photos looking down on the major ridges as evidence that we have reached the summit. The view is dramatic! To the south, east and west are mountains as far as I can see including the mighty Kangchenjunga and Makalu. To the north is the brown, barren Tibetan plateau. However, the most moving view is looking down the North Ridge towards the North Col and the Rongbuk Glacier.

This is the route where many of the early feats of courage and endurance were performed by the British expeditions. In the early 1920’s men struggled and fought their way to reach 28,000 feet without modern equipment and without reasonably efficient oxygen sets. I can see part of the ridge where they established their high camps, but the last 1000 feet, which proved to be such a formidable barrier, is hidden from view. The slopes drop away with frightening abruptness from the snowy summit pyramid. Again my thoughts turn to Mallory and Irvine who lost their lives somewhere on the mountain 29 years ago. I look around for some sign they have reached the summit, but can see nothing.

I turn around and see Tenzing crouch down and dig a small hole in the snow. I watch as he places in the hole some pieces of chocolate and other food and some small gifts for the gods whom he believes spend time on the summit. This jogs my memory and I reach into one of my pockets and pull out a small crucifix that John Hunt, the leader of the expedition, has given me. He asked me to leave it on the summit and I promised I would do so. I bend down and press the crucifix into the snow.

The 15 minutes spent on the summit have passed too quickly and I must think about going down, but before I do there is something else I have to do. Our expedition doctor Griffith Pugh always stated one of the greatest risks faced by climbers going high is dehydration. Before departing the tent Tenzing and I quaffed down copious quantities of hot lemon juice and now as a consequence I have a full bladder. There is nothing else to do but urinate. I move down the ridge on the Tibetan side a few feet so I will not be disrespectful to the highest mountain in the world. I focus on a rock slightly buried under the snow and when I finish I notice something jutting out beneath it. I look back over my shoulder at Tenzing. He has removed the flags from his ice axe and thrust them into the snow and is now looking back down into the Western Cwm towards Tengboche. I reach down and flip the rock over and there is an old sardine tin. Bloody hell! I don’t know what to do. Should I pick it up or flip the rock back over it. Curiosity gets the better of me. It takes a bit of prying, but I manage to free it from the ice. The tin has been opened and the inside is frozen ice. I turn the tin over in my gloved hand and notice a date scratched into the metal with the point of something sharp. I can’t believe what I am looking at. The date etched is 1947!

My initial thought is that the tin must have been left by Mallory or Irvine, but seeing the date I know it isn’t theirs. It takes me a second to recall who else has been on the mountain and I remember Earl Denman, the Canadian. He made an illegal attempt from the Tibetan side in 1947 with Ang Dawa and Tenzing, the very same Tenzing who is standing not more than 10 feet away from me and wearing Denman’s balaclava. I am beginning to feel lightheaded so I put the tin in my pocket and move up to Tenzing. I don’t say anything! I just give one nod of my head as a signal that it is time to leave. He too senses that our time on the summit is up. I clear any built-up ice from my mask, replace it on my face and turn on the valve. I check Tenzing’s valve to make sure it is working okay and then we begin retracing our steps down from the summit. A few feet down I stop and glance back at the summit stunned by the reality that someone had reached the top before us, someone else’s boots had left their footprints in the snow!

My lightheadedness disappears once I begin breathing the oxygen and I notice a distinct brightening of my vision. I just wish it would also clear my head of the sardine tin dilemma. Had Tenzing reached the summit with Denman? Why had he never said anything about Denman? Maybe Denman went for the summit by himself and didn’t tell Tenzing he had reached the top! Should I say something to Tenzing? Obviously, now isn’t the time. I have to focus on the descent!Coming down off the summit I am finding it much easier knowing the route and having steps to follow. In what seems like no time at all I am back at the top of the rock step. I down-climb the familiar crack reversing the procedure I had used to get up and wait for Tenzing to join me. Although tired, I am not too tired to be careful. I continue the descent down the ridge and after a short rise, I crampon back onto the South Summit. It has only taken one hour. I have a swig of sweetened lemon juice and hand the bottle back to Tenzing. I feel refreshed as I turn and begin descending again. Several times I touch the outside of my jacket pocket where the sardine tin is stashed. I have to reassure myself that it is real.

It is real and so is the fear I am feeling as I face the descent down the steep snow slope. The snow is very firm and Tenzing leads off re-cutting the steps as he goes until he reaches the end of the rope; then I come down. I carry on ahead and produce a neat line of steps for Tenzing to follow. To the left the snow is a little softer so I move over and begin stamping out firm footholds. This is done to ensure our security as the exposure below us is scary. Eventually I start moving right onto a narrow ridge above our camp and come across the oxygen bottles. We load them onto our backs and descend the short distance to our tent where we collapse as the oxygen bottles we are breathing from are now empty. It is 2 p.m..

Tenzing lights the Primus and makes refreshing hot lemon juice with sugar while I take the empty bottles off the pack frames and attach the one third full bottles. Going down I calculate we can get all the way to the South Col if I set the flow rate at two litres per minute instead of the three litres we have been using. I push the sleeping bags, air mattresses and personal gear into our packs, but leave the tent and empty oxygen bottles where they are. I can now sit down and enjoy the drink!

Although I am tired and my body feels numb, I take some time to reflect on the sardine tin and the moral dilemma of what to do with it. Why had Earl Denman never said anything about his ascent? Was it because it was unlawful? The Tibetan authorities know nothing about his attempt and if they did would it have implications for future expeditions? It is possible Denman’s ascent would not have been believed by the mountaineering community unless he had photographic evidence. So why, then, did he leave anything at all on the summit? Because it would verify his ascent when it was eventually found? If I had not walked from the summit down the North Ridge those few feet I may never have seen the rock or found the tin underneath it. Why did he bury it down there and not leave it on the very summit where it would have been more obvious? I start to suspect that he didn’t want it found by the next party to climb the mountain. The only sense I can make of it is that he wanted that party to announce, to the world, their success in being the first to conquer Mount Everest. Maybe in the future other mountaineers, who reached the summit from the north, might have found the sardine tin, but by then it would be too late to change history. Fortunately, or unfortunately, I found it! I know now what I must do.

With a last look at our tent that has served us so well I begin the final descent to the South Col. I follow Tenzing as we head towards the tattered remains of the Swiss campsite where we branch off on our last stage down to the great couloir. After a couple of feet I pause and pull the sardine tin out of my pocket. Looking down at it I silently acknowledge Denman’s extraordinary achievement and promise to find him when I get back to England. I throw the tin over the edge into the abyss. My heart cries as it disappears from sight.

Below us I find that the wind, which has been blowing in the latter part of our climb, has completely wiped out our tracks. It is now a hard, steep, frozen slope before us and in our tired state the gusting wind is trying to pluck us from our steps. I am resigned to cutting steps for another 200 feet before handing the lead over to Tenzing who cuts another 100 feet of steps.

At long last we exit the couloir and plod wearily down the long, easy slopes above the South Col. I can see a figure coming towards us and know it is my ol’ mate George Lowe. Tenzing and I both stop and turn to look at the mountain. This will be the last time today that the two of us – just the two of us - will stand together before the mountain and share this unbelievable day. The intensity of the wind is rising and a plume of snow is blowing off the summit ridge. Any sign of our footprints will soon vanish. Tenzing lifts the mask from his face, turns and leans towards me, the silhouette of Mount Everest mirrored in his dark obsidian eyes. In a discreet voice he whispers: “Secrets buried in the snow stay buried in the snow.”

Lindsay Elms: 2015.

Great Gable: Dalmar Harmood Banner 1941. (Lakeland Arts Trust)

August 18th 1909: Wednesday:

I walked up to the camp andBotterill said he would come up the Napes with me. Mr. Lloyd and I started up and reached the Dress Circle, where we lunched. In the Needle Gully were three would be climbers and three friends. They tried the crack on the West side but for one quarter of an hour had made no progress. Then Mr. Botterill, Mr and Mrs Addyman and the former’s sister arrived. He led me up the Abbey Ridge which ﬁrst yielded to his powers in April last. Since then, it has been climbed some fourteen times. The climb starts up somewhat broken but firm rock to the left of Easy Chimney on the Eagle’s Nest. Then a large slab projecting over the Arrowhead gully is reached. This affords a good take-off for the next portion which is fairly hard and very sensational.

A broad grass ledge is reached which offers a resting place before tackling the next pitch which consists of a magniﬁcent rock face nearly vertical for about 85ft. About 70ft up is an overhanging portion and this is the crux of the climb. The ﬁrst part is very sensational and rather difficult; a short traverse is made to the left and then higher to the right again. The holds beneath the overhang are small and scarce, a most important one being hidden beneath the lower left-hand corner of the projecting rock. Thence, the route is slightly to the right where a little shelf is reached and a pull up on it is effected. A few feet higher another grassy platform terminates the difficult portion. The next pitch is somewhat difficult but quite short. Above that, the easy portion of the Eagle’s Nest climb is joined.

We then descended the Needle Arete, Mr Botterill giving me a lesson in leading down. I found the rounded slabs below the West crack the hardest part. The holds are small and few; it is best to keep on the Needle Gully side of the slab, then the holds can be better appreciated. The final pitch is not very difficult to descend. By this time, one of the three men had reached the shoulder and the second was in the crack. Mr Botterill offered to lead them up and we rapidly climbed the Arête. In climbing the last pitch, the ascent to the Mantel-Shelf is best done from the extreme right hand side of the shoulder, then on traversing the shelf to the left, the left knee can be easily placed on the rounded knob of rock. A finger and thumb hold for the right hand being found near the corner, on straightening up on the left knee the rounded hold far right is reached and by standing on the shelf where the left knee is, the top is reached and a pull-up effected. We brought up the three climbers and descended the Western Crack of the Needle — the Wasdale Crack.

Mr. Botterill’s climbing is a marvel of neatness and skill, nerve and muscle. He then led the two ladies up the Arrowhead Gully and I led the two gentlemen. Reaching the grassy ridges between Hell Gates, we walked up the left side of the Westmorland Crags to the summit of the Gable. Then down steep grass slopes to the Head Tarn where our party divided — Mr. Botterill, Mr. Lloyd and Mr. Williamson returning to Wasdale and myself and the two others to Seathwaite, thence to the Albion Hotel, Keswick.

Abraham Brothers glass plate image:Fell and Rock Club

April 3rd and 4th 1910, Sunday and Monday:

Cycled to Seathwaite and then walked up Grain’s Ghyll to Great End which was in a thick mist. After refreshments, which included some excellent coffee of Mrs. Abraham’s, we deposited the rucksacks under a large boulder at the foot of the Central Gully and began the ascent. We heard the voices of other climbers somewhere on the crags to the right of our gully but could not see them as it was snowing fairly fast. Abraham led, rapidly kicking steps in the hard snow. Some distance higher, the angle steepened and steps had to be cut as there were two inches of fresh snow lying on ice. There were traces of a previous party but their steps were almost obliterated. About half way up we came to a large pitch in the shape of a vertical wall of ice on the left and a cave roofed in by a large boulder on the right. I anchored myself in the cave while Abraham cut up the wall on the left.

About two thirds of the way up or 15Oft higher, the gully was divided by a narrow rib of rock. The left hand branch ran up to the sky line some 80ft higher in a very steep slope. Abraham was beneath the central rib of rock and I was some 6 yards behind and sheltered by the projecting rocks on the right of the gully. At this point the mist thinned and the sun came out faintly overhead. We were admiring the scenery which was magnificent when our attention was attracted by a hissing noise in the left hand gully.A few second later a large quantity of the surface snow shot past us and disappeared with a faint roar over the vertical wall below. Before we had quite recovered from our astonishment, a similar but larger avalanche swished down the right hand branch, up which our route lay, and passing between us, (we held up the rope to prevent a jerk) obliterated all traces of the steps which Abraham had cut.

Never having been on a snow slope before, I was somewhat alarmed although our positions were quite safe. The friendly rocks effectively protected us from avalanches but their ascent was impracticable. After a consultation during which two more avalanches passed between us -so close that either of us could have touched them from where we stood -and disappeared over the pitch below, leaving a track of smooth ice which looked very sinister, we decided to descend the right side of the slope, under the shelter of rocks for 50ft and then to force a way up a break in the right wall. To effect this, it was necessary for Abraham to traverse the exposed portion of the slope, to where I was anchored. To shorten the time during which he would be on the dangerous part, I cut three steps on my side of the slope and he did the same on his.

Then after the next avalanche he rapidly and very skilfully traversed the slope and joined me. We descended to the break in the wall and Abraham led up on to the face. The rocks were coated with ice and snow and in parts very rotten but they seemed very welcome after the treacherous snow in the gully. The rocks necessitated very great care and took us about 3 hours, but John Abraham led splendidly.

It was very cold and snowing again when we reached the summit cairn. We consulted my compass -unfortunately the map was left in the rucksack and so was the lantern — and we struck off in an Easterly direction. We passed two other cairns leading down towards a steep snow slope and cautiously following it we came upon some footprints and farther on traces of a path, which led us down on to a sort of col. The valley to the left was our objective but the direct descent into it appeared steep and craggy in the dim light, so we followed the path thinking it would shortly bend round to the left. However, some long time passed before we came below the mist and there in front of us lay a fine tarn, with our path winding up the fell side above it and to the right.

Abraham said it must be Angle Tarn, and that we were on the Esk Hause track to Langdale. It was very dark by this time, and we did not wish to get to Langdale or to return to the summit of Great End, so we struck off down the valley on our left by the side of a stream. It was stony, rough and very dark. In parts it was boggy and very soft. For hours we trudged gaily along without any signs of human habitation.

Once we came to a fine wall with a gate leading through and we expected to come on a house, but in vain. We struggled along through streams and over boulders, yet remarkably happy and contented withal. Eventually, J .C.A. spotted a continuous wall on our left and thought there might be a path on the other side. We scaled it and were delighted to find traces of one. It varied absurdly from a perfectly level carriage road to a rough scramble over boulders. Gates we encountered at intervals, but still no sign of habitation.

Eventually, on rounding a corner, we saw a distant light and raised a cheer. In a few minutes we reached the cottage and on enquiring where we were, heard that it was Stonethwaite and we had walked the length of the Langstrath Valley. A farmer very kindly took us a short cut over the fields to the main Borrowdale road, and an hour later we reached Seathwaite Farm again. It was 10.00 p.m., we had been out 12 hours, had three sandwiches to eat and done a strenuous climb.

When asked what we would like to eat, Abraham suggested ham and eggs and these were promptly prepared and ravenously eaten. The coolness of these proceedings did not strike us until later. We retired to bed but were too tired to sleep soundly. However, we awoke refreshed and discussed the situation. Whiting expected us Sunday evening and we feared that he would wire to Keswick, and on finding that we had left, would send out a search party. Hence we thought it our duty to reach Wasdale as soon as possible. Accordingly I left at once and reached the hotel at 9.00 a.m., in time for breakfast.

Then I returned to Sty Head to meet J .C.A. and Westmorland who had brought down our rucksacks from Great End. Expecting to do Kern Knotts, I had left my axe behind. As Westmorland was keen on doing Cust’ s Gully, I went back to Wasdale and the other two went on. They had a good day and found that most of the new snow had come down.

Needle Gully glass plate image:Fell and Rock Club

George Sansom: 1909-10

The Haunting

The Edge of the World

Clean Climbing

Westward Ho! : Simon Armitage's 'Walking Away...reviewed

Alfred Wainwright-Northern Soul

Don Whillans.....Climbing like a ruptured duck!

Across Lakeland in a day: With a little help from my friends

Hamish MacInnes: The Sage of Glencoe

Braided Lives: The Vince Betts Story

For Rattus Novegicus: A brief history of the Shiant Isles

Statement: The Ben Moon story......reviewed

Your lovely hills are very dangerous

A Climber Extraordinaire

Seven days on the Eigerwand

Slim Sorrell: Northern Grit

The Edge of the World

The Children of the May Tides

The Climber's Voice: Festival Memories

29/5/53........A Short Story

Extracts from George Sansom's Climbing Journal: 1909-10