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The English Lake District - The Crucible of Climbing
Robin Ashcroft from the Kendal Mountain Festival (www.mountainfest.co.uk) looks at how the sport of climbing first developed on the Lake District crags.
Despite their very modest height, the mountains of the Lake District had a profound influence on the development of mountaineering. Until the first ascent of Napes Needle in1886, the English pioneers who established mountaineering as a sport focussed entirely on the European Alps. As alpinists they saw the Lakeland crags as nothing more than a training ground for their alpine adventures.
It was in 1884 - and in this alpine context - that Walter Parry Haskett Smith made the first exploration of Great Gable's Needle Ridge. As a climb it is largely alpine in character, an obvious line to a summit and ideal training for the type of route then undertaken in the Alps. During his climbs (both in ascent and descent) on the ridge he noticed the spectacular, free-standing obelisk after which it was named - Napes Needle.
Two years later Haskett-Smith would return, to make the first ascent of "The Needle" by a climb now known as the Westmorland Crack. Even today it remains a challenging and intimidating route for its grade (Hard Severe); Haskett-Smith's first ascent was even more remarkable for having been a solo climb. He also did a hand stand on the summit - which is about the size of a card table!
This event marked a watershed in mountaineering attitudes; henceforth it became acceptable to climb a section of rock for its own sake. The alpine pre-requisite of reaching a summit was no longer required and British crags became a worthy challenge in their own right. No longer were our mountains seen as just a training ground for the Alps. The sport of climbing was born.
A private income and the extended leisure time a trip to the Alps demanded was no longer a pre-requisite to becoming a mountaineer. The cliffs of the Lake District - and shortly after those in Snowdonia and the Highlands - would open up mountaineering to a much wider spectrum of society. Throughout the late Victorian and the Edwardian eras, the upper middle-class gentlemen of The Alpine Club gradually lost their dominance of mountaineering, giving way to sportsmen from the lower middle-classes.
In the decades before the First World War, rock climbs on the Lake District crags were amongst the most technically demanding and difficult of those found anywhere in mountaineering. Wasdale Head, complete with its famous hotel, became the base from which the finest climbers of a generation sallied forth to find real, cutting-edge adventure on the cliffs of Scafell, Great Gable and Pillar.
They made this amphitheatre of Lakeland rock their arena, their efforts were Olympian. Names such as O.G. Jones, Frederick Botterill and Siegfried Herford deserve to be ranked alongside Hillary, Messner and Bonington. Their climbs, routes like Kern Notts Crack, Botterill's Slab and Central Buttress were at the absolute forefront of what was deemed possible. Even today, they still generate great respect amongst modern climbers.
©RNA; Sep 09
