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Barefoot in the Twenties
AB Reynolds climbing Murray's Route on Dow Crag-Barefoot and in winter! For many with an interest in the evolution of British mountaineering the twenties appear as an out of focus blur on the distant...
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Rising Ground: A Search for the Spirit of Place...Review
Philip Marsden’s new book explores an idea as much as it explores a country. It journeys westward through Cornwall from Bodmin Moor to Scilly, alighting on the rocky eminences where granite has boiled...
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The Pillarite Patriarch
Demar Harmood Banner: Lakeland Arts TrustThe Pillarite Patriarch, or to refer to him correctly - Rev. James Jackson, is known among Lakeland climbing historians, as the elderly gentleman who took up...
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Statement: The Ben Moon story......reviewed
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...
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Long Views in the Hills
Cross Fell: Delmar Harmood Banner. "Perhaps the worst viewpoint in England' HG. Image Lakeland Arts Trust.Ever since a sparkling August dawn in 1930 when two of us, after a night on the summit, saw-...
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Alternative Slate
Photo:MaryMaryGeography mutates inhabitants: the quarrymen, generation upon generation, dug in, taking hits and diminishing the mountain for the demanded slate; day after day, lung after lung,...
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The Haunting
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,...
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The Edge of the World
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...
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Joss Naylor: The Way of the Warrior
Surely, I thought, Joss Naylor's heart and ambition was too big for his spare frame and spindly legs. These days nobody knocks 30 per cent off a record — indeed records are broken by fractions of one...
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The Climber's plants of Lakeland
Nameless Gully on the SW side of Robinson above Buttermere. THE experts will tell you there may be up to 18.000 varieties of flowers, plants, mosses and ferns growing in the Lakeland hills, but there...
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Pen Trwyn Patrol....1983
John Redhead on Bittersweet Connection.Original Photo Keith Robinson/JR Collection. When the rains came central Snowdonia might lay cloud banked and brooding for weeks on end. Its inhabitants...
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Fell Tiger....Harold Drasdo Obituary
Harold Drasdo, who died in hospital in Bangor, North Wales, last week after a short illness, was in the vanguard of the remarkable post war ascendency of working class Northern English rock climbers....
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Wonderwall
George Smith in turbo mode at Gogarth:Photo Tony Loxton There are two ways to gain the area known as Easter Island and whilst one presents difficulties that might only be overcome by hard core...
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Ukrainian overlords of the underworld
An 11-person team of Ukrainian cavers were wading through the snow on the way down from the Arabika massif in the western Caucasus on a January night. They had just descended the Krubera Cave to a...
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The Making of 'The Bat and the Wicked'
Stills from the Bat and the Wicked: Climbers Brian Hall and Rab CarringtonPredictably the first drop of rain splattered the windscreen as we left the M6 and crossed the Scottish border. Ahead, the...
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Bill Murray: 'Dance upon the mountains like a flame'
“… in the worst days of the war there shone most often before my eyes the clear vision of that evening on Nevis, when the snow plateau sparkled red at sunset, and of Glencoe, when the frozen towers of...
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Earl Denham's Confession
Earlier this year we featured Canadian writer, Lindsay Elm's '29/5/53...A short story; the first part of an intended trilogy surrounding the Everest activities of little known Canadian mountaineer-...
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Gary Snyder...The Cold Mountain Poet
Gary Snyder: Photo Arya Degenhardt: Mono Lake CommunityWho can leap the world ties/and sit with me amongst the white cloudsHan Shan,a Tang Dynasty poet.Almost half a century ago, I was walking back to...
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Alex Honnold's 'Alone on the Wall'....Review
'What's Alex Honnold's greatest achievement' asks a CBS reporter of elder statesman John Long. 'His greatest achievement?....staying alive!!!'. Following on from the 2010 documentary, 'Alone on the...
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TH Somervell-Man of Everest
TH Somerville-front left with G Bruce right.1924 Everest Expedition. Photo, Bentley Beetham.HE WAS already the grandest of old men when I met him in the early summer of 1970. He was then 80 years old,...
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