Pillar Rock from Black Sail: A Heaton Cooper.Photo Heaton-Cooper Studios
IT began
early. Ever since leaving Germany as a small boy, a fugitive from the Führer, I
have been surrounded by all sorts of mountains; that is probably the only thing
I have to thank the Führer for. The first were the cliff’s and hills of
Majorca, an island where the most varied beauties of hill, plain and shore are
compressed into the space of a few square miles. When we had been set free from
the schoolroom some hot summer afternoon, a pack of us, wearing only shorts and
a pair of alpargatas – light canvas shoes with rope soles which every- one in
these parts wears – would rush out over the parched heath towards the fresh air
of the seashore and the cliffs.
And what adventures we had among them, those
fantastic limestone shapes, their features wrinkled by wind and sea into
countless corrugations which the alpargatas gripped with delightful firmness;
with their great mysterious caves, in which the breakers boomed resonantly over
stolid ranks of sea-hedgehogs and other queer-shaped creatures. This was the training
ground where I first learnt to climb with all four extremities, There was one
particularly large cave, with a chimney at the far end; you climbed up this,
and suddenly you’ emerged from the cold clammy recess on to a sun-baked plateau
high above the sea. It was a new surprise every time we did it, and rather what
I imagine the "secret" chimney on the Bhasteir tooth to be like. But
the Spanish sun in summer has little in common with its feeble counterpart of
more northerly latitudes, and soon we would be scampering off again to the
shelter of our caves.
Once I
was taken for a holiday to Valldemosa, a little village tucked away among the
central hills - the place where Chopin spent leisured years composing his most
entrancing melodies. They were parched, sparsely vegetated hills, crouching low
as if ducking from the stinging rays of the sun. The name Georges Sand gave to
the island, "La verde Helvecia", the green Switzerland, must be taken
as artistic license; those hills were more the sort of thing, I fancy, that
the Author of "Don Quixote" had in mind when he described that
wretched knight’s wanderings through the wastes of the Sierra Morena. The cool
vineyards and gardens of the village were definitely more inviting.
Another
place that deserves mention is the great mountain under whose shadow I lived
for a while, Mont Serrat, in Catalonia, a great jagged rock peak rising
abruptly from the foothills of the Pyrenees. It gives pretty good climbing, and
its rock towers are popular with Spanish mountaineers. Perched somewhere near
the summit is a monastery, famous all over Spain.
The Civil
War turned everybody’s thoughts to anything but mountains, but as fate would
have it I found myself not long after its outbreak among the Dolomites of
Southern Tyrol. It is hardly necessary to say that they were a revelation.
Their gigantic size and appalling steepness, and especially the absolute
bareness of their gleaming white rock, overpowered the mind, but yet at the same
time held out a promise of joys to come. They became to me what the
engine-driver’s cabin and the pirate’s quarterdeck are to other boys of the
same age, and I can remember with what mixed jealousy and admiration I saw
bronzed and tough-looking Italian youths setting out for the mountains with axe
and rope. That was one of the few good things the Duce introduced, the training
of young people among great peaks, and we might with advantage imitate it, as
Geoffrey Winthrop Young has suggested.
The most impressive of all those
magnificent mountains was the Langkofel, a lengthy ridge buttressed by huge
towers, and a true climbers’ paradise, as readers of Smythe’s "Adventures
of a. Mountaineer" will know.
Bowfell Buttress above the Langdale Valley
But it
was left to that perfect miniature of mountain landscape, the English Lake
District, to turn admiration into action. In 1940, hustled out of London by
anxious parents, I woke up one morning after a night journey by road from
Windermere to find Buttermere Moss looking down at me through the window. A modest
sort of mountain, you may say, but to one who had barely seen a molehill for
years it was lofty enough. Well, there I was, an hour later, puffing and
blowing up my first real hill. Standing at last upon the summit, out of breath
and up to my ankles in one of those ubiquitous Lakeland bogs, I felt at last
the true joy of the mountaineer, and made a firm resolve that before the year
had passed I would set foot on all the dozens of peaks that were visible even
from that low eminence.
It wasn’t allowing a great deal of time, but two years
later the ambition had been fulfilled and surpassed. There was the mighty
Grasmoor, (the Lake District has of course a scale of adjectives all its own),
with its halo of lesser heights, Hobcarton, Sail, Causey Pike; the ridge of
High Stile, above Buttermere, with its grand view and succulent bilberries;
massive Pillar Mountain and the slender Steeple, rising from the deserted
valley of Ennerdale. Then again, a kindly walker took me up the Guide’s route
to Scafell Pikes, the highest of them all; this is a fine mountaineering route,
winding its way up the mountain’s flank to land one on the boulder-strewn
summit plateau. One would have thought that a debris-covered, windswept summit
like the Pikes would be even less inviting than the hills of Majorca; yet it is
a remarkable fact that the bare stark nature of many of the Lake District
hilltops lends them a peculiar attractiveness.
Perhaps it is due to the part
they play in furnishing the contrast in a land already rich in contrasts:
steep rock face against gentle grass slope; dry bracken, russet heather and
grass against blue lakes and grey rocks; and the most obvious contrast of all,
the ceaseless changing of the weather. Then there was the true sovereign of the
Lakes, Great Gable, a mountain of many aspects, but majestic in them all, and
possessing one of the best views in all the district; Skiddaw, the shapeless
mass that looks so imposing and is so impossibly tame, with its complete lack
of contrast and its path fit for a four-in-hand right up to the summit;
Catbells and Maiden Moor, odd-shaped sentinels of Derwentwater.... there seemed
to be no end to the summits we could tread.
And then,
just when I was beginning to feel myself the "Compleat Mountaineer ",
vast new fields were suddenly opened up by the possibility of climbing. I had
always thought of rock-climbers as very superior persons who were on the plane altogether from us humble walkers, until one day I found myself gaily
scaling the vertical side of Pillar Rock with a sangfroid I should have
shuddered at a year before. This New West climb really does merit the attention
of all climbers, from the trembling novice to the most hardened veteran bred in
the tradition of de Selincourtian gravity-defiance. It has plenty of exposure
and sensational positions, it is steep in the most modern meaning of the word,
and in its three hundred feet or so of continuous climbing it calls for all
types of technique.
It starts with a "staircase ", traverses off the
"landing" to a steep groove, soon after which the climber can
spread-eagle himself on a step even wider than the notorious Strid on the North
climb. Then follows a beautiful chimney, complete with chock-stone, and topped
by a wicked vice which most people attempt the first time they do the climb, in
the mistaken belief that the route continues up it. As a matter of fact, it
emerges from the chimney to follow a traverse which is almost completely hidden
from the climber inside the chimney. This traverse is not lavish with its
handholds, and gives exhilarating balance climbing. Finally there is a dose of
good smooth slabs, which take one right out on to the summit of the Rock. The
sort of perfect climb that a valley-bound cragsman might compose for the solace
of his imagination, as a gourmet on a desert island might conjure up visions of
the perfect meal. And yet withal it is easy enough, unless of course it happens
to be raining.
There are
plenty of other climbs of moderate difficulty on the Rock; the North climb is
of course one of the classic climbs of Great Britain. There’ is one place on it
where the leader unropes and makes a long detour to avoid the only tough place
on the climb, which incidentally makes up for all the other tough places that
aren’t. When I did this I spent a considerable time trying to locate my second
when I had reached the top; while his mind was no doubt filled with the most
gloomy forebodings.
The
Pillar Rock is impressive enough, especially if you approach Low Man in mist,
(the normal state), when the great steep ribs soar up into what seems to be
infinity. But, even on a fine day, I know of nothing to compete with the face
of Scafell for sheer splendor and power of rock scenery. One gets a good view
of the whole thing from Pikes Crag, but I found it most awe-inspiring to
scramble up the bed of Deep Ghyll, an enormously deep ravine cutting back
between the sheer walls of Deep Ghyll Buttress and the Pinnacle. On either side
you have the walls of the ravine, and between them a narrow field of view
filled by Great Gable and Pillar. We tried one of the climbs on the Pinnacle
Wall of the ghyll, known as Jones and Collier’s climb, which was first climbed
by the great pioneer Owen Glynne Jones. It consists mainly of a continuous
traverse above an overhang, with the bed of the ghyll dropping away below. We
did it in boots, and as a result I would recommend rubbers for this climb; the
holds are strictly of utility quality.
The Abraham 'Keswick' Brothers
One finishes to the top along the famous
Knife-edge Ar0te, which is ascended horseback-fashion on account of the
considerable drop below on either side. The Pinnacle has a number of things in
common with the Pillar Rock, including a gap which prevents direct access to
the summit. Below Low Man, falling sheer, is the Pinnacle Face. The routes up
this face are climbs of the highest delicacy, with few belays worthy of the
name the sort of place where the rule that the leader must not fall is
expanded to include every member of the party. The face has a number of
casualties to its discredit, and we left it well alone, until such time as we
might become very much more competent climbers. We sampled the buttress
climbing on Scafell by going up the Keswick Brothers’ climb, an old favourite,
which works its way pleasantly up one of the steeply tilted strata which
compose the left-hand part of Scafell Precipice. It is a true face climb,
though it does sometimes delve into a chimney where a flake has split away from
the main stratum.
While it
is true that a large proportion of the best climbing is in the central massif
around Great Gable, that versatile mountain which attracts the climber as much
as the walker, there is a great deal scattered more diffusely over the rest of
the district. Gimmer Crag, for instance, proved to be an ideal place to spend a
hot unenergetic summer’s day. Most of the climbs are hard, some of them very,
but they are short, and the crag has the advantage of being easily reached; the
climbs perhaps tend to be what is called rock gymnastics, but they provide at
least excellent training. Langdale is dotted about with other climbs, for
instance the classic Bowfell Buttress, surely one of the most enjoyable of its
kind, continuous and not artificial. Dow Crag would almost constitute a
life-study in itself, with its small area with an incredible concentration of
routes of all types and standards. In the latter respect it differs from
Lliwedd, which is more uniformly hard, I should just like to mention Gordon and
Craig’s route, which we found remarkable for a long dead level traverse with so
little lebensraum that it is necessary almost to bend double and lean out over
space – a good test of balance.
Finally,
there are any number of "outlying crags ", as the guide-books call
them, the Mecca of those with a bent for blazing new trails. Thus the
Buttermere region, and especially Birkness Coombe, above Buttermere Lake, has
been extensively developed in recent years, as a glance at recent numbers of
the Journal of the Fell and Rock Climbing Club will show. We couldn’t resist
the temptation to try and make a variation to the "Oxford and
Cambridge" Climb, in this coombe, just to shift the balance in favour of
Cambridge; our success was highly questionable, as the said variation was
partly done on a rope. However, it consists of swarming up a sort of pinnacle
and then traversing horizontally across Dexter Wall to join the parent climb at
the top of the second pitch, and is quite entertaining. This sort of thing is
very small meat, but A. T. Hargreaves, who ought to know, assures us in an
article in the above-mentioned journal that there are still various crags
awaiting such intensive exploration as Buttermere has had.
During
the war we have been restricted to the hills of Britain, though I imagine that
most of us are not conscious of this as a restriction at all. We have learnt to
cherish these hills for their own sake, and not to value them merely as a
training ground for attempts on bigger game. The Lake District is far more than
this; and have not Alpine and Himalayan climbers who spent early years on its
crags always returned to its friendly intimacy after months spent on
inhospitable snow and ice? Certainly, should it ever be my fortune to climb on
bigger mountains, I shall nevertheless come back to the cradle of my
mountaineering aspirations, the English Lakes.
Skiddaw from Derwentwater:Oil on board- J Appleby
RW Cahn 1944
