corporal clegg and friends

When I came to work at the Outward Bound School of Hong Kong in January 1974, I’d been attracted by the statement that ‘there are miles and miles of unexplored sea cliffs’. At the time, the school’s rock-climbing program was inadequate, so there was an urgent need to develop a more demanding alternative. The first location I visited was Fat Tong Point, in the far southeast of the New Territories (see map), which overlooks the narrow channel—Fat Tong Mun—between the mainland and Tung Lung Island.

In those days, it was common to see Chinese sailing junks negotiating Fat Tong Mun (mun is Cantonese for ‘door’), and I was most impressed by the levels of seamanship on display, because it was often necessary to perform complicated manoeuvres if the wind was blowing from an unfavourable direction. Incidentally, the logo of the Hong Kong Tourist Association is a sailing junk, but I haven’t seen a real one in Hong Kong harbour for decades. There is a motorized junk that plies the waters of the harbour, but this is merely an attraction for tourists, much like the rickshaws that used to line up next to the Star Ferry piers in Kowloon and on Hong Kong Island.

Fat Tong Point proved to be an ideal climbing venue for Outward Bound students, and we started using it a few months after I arrived in Hong Kong. We would go there with a group of twelve students for two days, camping overnight. On the first day, we tried to do as many easier climbs as we could on the section of cliff directly overlooking the narrowest part of the channel. The following photo is of a page from my records of the time. It shows four of these climbs, which range in length between 40 and 100 feet. The procedure was that I or my colleague for the exercise would lead a climb, and a student would then follow. They would then take the instructor’s place at the top and throw the rope down for the next student, a procedure that was repeated until everyone had done the climb.

The second day was a much tougher proposition. We identified four climbs graded VS (very severe, a respectable level of difficulty), and the challenge for the students was to climb all four. The next two photos show me leading the first of these climbs, Corporal Clegg. I had at the time a penchant for naming climbs after Pink Floyd songs, and this one is named after a track on the band’s second album, Saucerful of Secrets:

Corporal Clegg
Had a wooden leg.

Incidentally, the hardest climb at Fat Tong Point, Astronomy Domine, is named after a track on Pink Floyd’s first album, Piper at the Gates of Dawn. It would have been too dangerous for students to attempt.

The next climb is The Stoat, and the next two photos show my colleague David Lam leading the upper section. The lower section features a vicious finger-jamming crack that feels as if it’s trying to bite your fingers off, so I named it Weasel Crack. However, this climb continues up the easy section to the right of the climber, and I thought that the sloping ramp would make a better (i.e. harder) finish.

I don’t have any photos of the third climb, Right-Hand Wall, which was the only open wall climb among the four.

I named the fourth climb Cumbrian’s Chimney because I’m a native of Cumbria in the UK. Whenever I needed to get from the bottom to the top of a climb, I could go around the easy way, but I was always more likely to climb a route solo instead, as I’m seen doing in the next photo:

 Most of the climb succumbs to straightforward chimneying techniques, but in the photo, I’ve just reached the crux move. The chimney has closed to a narrow crack, so it is necessary to pull over an overhang. The conventional handholds are poor, but there are bomb-proof hand jams in the narrow crack.

I remember few specific incidents from the time we climbed here, but there is one that has remained lodged in my memory for more than 40 years. It was the second day, and as usual the target was for everyone to climb the four routes I’ve just described. A student came up to me:

“Sir! Sir!” he said. “I’m very tired.”

“How many climbs have you done James?” I asked.

“Two sir.”

“That means you have two more to do then!”

I don’t think this was the reply he wanted, but I never had any hesitation in taking advantage of aspects of Chinese culture—in this case that no Chinese will gainsay a teacher—in order to push students to step outside their personal comfort zones. And there is a postscript: James did climb the other two routes, and when we were being ferried back to school, the executive director, who was driving the school launch, asked who one of the students was. It was James, who now had a distinct swagger in his bearing.

We stopped going to Fat Tong Point for climbing in 1976, mainly because of the difficulty in extricating a party should there be a typhoon in the area. Now, the area has been taken over by the Clearwater Bay Golf and Country Club, and access to the climbing areas is much more difficult.

from the archives: dolomite diversion

I travelled abroad for the first time in 1966, when I was still a teenager. My companions were two fellow students from Manchester—the same two students who had introduced me to rock climbing only a few months earlier, which I mention only because climbing was our reason for going abroad in the first place.

Our first intended destination was Innsbruck in Austria. We’d booked tickets for a train that had been organized by the Anglo-Austrian Alpine Club (AAAC), and we got off to a less than auspicious start by boarding the wrong train in Ostend! The carriages of this train were emblazoned with the AAAC logo, which misled us even though we did notice that the destination boards on the sides of the carriages read ‘Wien’. We had no idea at the time that this was the German word for Vienna.

Every seat on the train had been pre-booked, so without a booking for this specific train, we had no option but to sit on our rucksacks in the corridor. This was an overnight train, but sleeping on a train where you don’t even have a seat is not an option. We thought that it was merely our bad luck at first, but our tickets included a list of towns and cities that our train was meant to pass through, and it didn’t take us long to realize that we weren’t passing through any of them. Incidentally, our tickets were supposed to have our names on them, but I can still remember the name that the AAAC had given me. I often used to be complimented on the neatness of my handwriting, so how the club concluded that my name was ‘Downis Hoolison’ is a question to which I shall never find the answer.

Anyway, by the time we reached Nuremberg, we’d decided that our best option would be to leave this train, with all our gear, and catch a train to Munich, which our intended train was scheduled to pass through. So that’s what we did. No tickets. We didn’t think we needed them.

Of course, we did encounter a ticket inspector on this early-morning train. I’ve often wondered what he made of whatever feeble explanations we offered for being on his train without tickets.

“Stupid Englanders!” he probably thought.

Fortunately, he didn’t ask to check my ticket against my passport, or he might have spotted the discrepancy in names. And he did allow us to continue our journey without paying. And we did manage to join the train we should have caught in the first place in Munich. After all that, the remainder of the journey was utterly unmemorable.

However, Innsbruck turned out to be a mistake. We had thought of stopping off there for a few days to do some ‘mountaineering’ before continuing to our ultimate destination, the Dolomites in northern Italy, but we quickly realized that this was overly optimistic. You may detect a lack of planning on this excursion to date.

The following day, we caught the first available train to Bolzano and trekked up into a steeply rising valley flanked by towering walls of magnesian limestone. Conventional limestone consists of the mineral calcite (calcium carbonate), which is soluble in a weak solution of carbonic acid, another term for rainwater. Magnesian limestone, on the other hand, is made up of the mineral dolomite, which differs from calcite in that half the calcium atoms have been replaced by magnesium, and these are arranged in precisely alternating positions in the lattice. This makes dolomite more resistant to weathering than calcite, hence the towers and spires that I was seeing all around me. Our ‘plan’ was to reach a small rifugio (‘refuge’), or mountain hut, where we would spend the night before continuing. And this is what faced us the following morning:

The sunlit spire on the right is a profile of the three Vajolet Towers, which we aspired to climb. But first we had to reach the next rifugio, which is up to the left and out of sight but was ideally located for our ‘planned’ assault on the towers. I haven’t mentioned it before, but as a first-timer abroad, I hadn’t cottoned on to the need to travel light. In addition to my climber’s rucksack, which was a crude affair compared with what you can buy nowadays, I’d brought a holdall. As you can imagine, lugging all that up that hill was not pretty.

Anyway, this is what the towers look like from the rifugio:

We had intended to tackle the left-hand tower first, but we came under the watchful eye of an Austrian climber, several years older than me, who appeared to be alone. He noted that there were three of us, and a rope of three will take almost twice as long to complete a given climb than a rope of two. Would one of us like to climb with him? I was always going to be the odd man out here, because my friends had known each other before they knew me, so we arranged to meet the next morning to climb the central tower.

“Too many mousquetons!” said Max imperiously, as he watched me walk towards him.

I had half a dozen rope slings around my neck, each with a metal snaplink attached. I remember thinking at the time: how strange; someone whose native tongue is German (presumably) chooses to use a French word. Perhaps he thinks we won’t know what a karabiner is.

Anyway, we set off, and I quickly noticed that Max was using a ‘direct belay’ protection method, a primitive safety precaution that involves temporarily allowing the rope to run behind a flake or spike of rock, so that if Max, in this case, happened to slip, he wouldn’t fall as far as he would have done without the protection. There’s just one snag! Allowing the rope to run over potentially sharp edges is not a smart idea. When it was my turn to lead, if I came to a suitable spike or flake, I placed a sling over it and clipped the rope to the sling using the attached karabiner, which allowed the rope to run freely, away from those edges. Of course, a sharp edge can still cut through the sling if it comes under load, but all you lose is a sling. The rope remains intact. And Max did have the grace to confess, later, that he now understood why I carried so many mousquetons.

The ascent wasn’t particularly interesting. Rock climbing is only ever interesting when you have to think how to proceed (and if you’ve read Rigor Mortis, you’ll know that I once spent 45 minutes in one place on a climb trying to work out what to do next). And this climb wasn’t even hard.

But there was only one word to describe the descent: harrowing. I’m not sure whether I’d any previous experience of abseiling (American usage: rappelling), but it would have been sketchy at best. By the way, I purposely included the word ‘usage’ above because it points to another linguistic confusion in climbing terminology. While an American will rappel (a French word) down a steep cliff, his British counterpart will abseil (a German word) down the same cliff. Max abseiled too.

Not only do you need an anchor point to abseil from, you need to be able to retrieve the rope once you’ve descended. And the only suitable anchor point on the top of the tower was a groove less than an inch deep that had been chipped into the rock adjoining one edge of the tower. There were no friction devices in those days, so it would have been necessary to run the rope over my shoulder and across my back to generate the friction needed to control the descent, but all I can remember is how hard it was to get over the edge. I kept expecting the rope to lift out of its groove if I couldn’t keep my weight below it. The problem was starting with my weight above the anchor. The remainder of the descent was much less alarming. And we eventually made it back to the rifugio.

We decided to return to the lower hut the following morning, probably because the accommodation there was cheaper. The next photo is a view down towards that lower hut, which is out of sight in the picture:

And that was the end of the climbing. The weather deteriorated badly over the next few days, and after those few days, with no end in sight, my erstwhile companions decided to bugger off back to Blighty. I wanted to stay, but I was running short of cash. However, after my friends had left, I became friendly with a couple of students from Oxford who, amazingly, had a spare tent I could use. It was more like a bivouac, to be honest, but it did mean I could afford to hang around a while longer. And I did learn how to play contract bridge. The next photo shows a rescue helicopter and provides some idea of how bad the weather was (snow is a rarity in summer in the Dolomites).

The two Oxford students had driven from England in an Austin A35 van, and when we’d all finally had enough of the weather, they offered me a lift back home in exchange for a share of the fuel costs. There was just one final problem: the bad weather had triggered a landslide that had wiped out about 100 metres of the local access road, and we were on the uphill side. And the word was that the road would not be repaired until next season.

However, there were five or six other vehicles that had been trapped by the slide, 15–20 people altogether, and we decided to build a temporary roadway across the debris. I’ve no idea where we got all the timber (see following photo), but we spent most of the day shifting huge quantities of rubble, soil and boulders and then laying a narrow causeway across the slide. I’ve had some extreme endurance experiences during my life, but I don’t think I ever worked physically as hard as I did that day. When we were finally ready, we pushed the cars across one by one, not without considerable anxiety that one might suddenly career off downhill.

One of the Italians in the ad hoc labour gang brought out a bottle of wine. Just enough for a quick swig each, but a nice gesture—after all, we had achieved our objectice by working as a team. And then we were on our way home, nursing memories of huge bowls of spaghetti with tiny dollops of Bolognese sauce. I didn’t try spaghetti again for many years, and even now, the pasta:sauce ratio has to be close to 50:50.

Anyway, we reached England without further alarm or exertion. I said farewell to my two new friends and proceeded to hitch-hike north to Penrith. I can’t remember much about that journey north, but I can’t forget one encounter. I’ve no idea from where and to where the person giving me the lift was travelling, but at one point he slid his hand lightly down the top of my thigh.

“Nice material,” he said.

I used to wear corduroy climbing britches in those days, and I didn’t interpret this move as a sexual advance, because there was no squeezing or unseemly pressure. Mind you, his next remark should have left me in no doubt, but I took the question literally and merely thought that my questioner was a bit odd. It was 1966 after all, and homosexual acts were still illegal.

“Do you ever go looking for fairies?” he asked.

“There are no such things as fairies!” I replied.

Damn! Another poor fairy has just dropped down stone dead. It tends to happen, or so I’ve been led to believe. The driver didn’t say another word until he dropped me off where he’d said he would drop me off, and the rest of the journey home was uneventful.

nightmare story

I’ve written previously of how I was originally attracted to Hong Kong in 1974 by the following statement in a job advert:

There are miles and miles of unclimbed sea cliffs.

This statement turned out to be true, but most of these sea cliffs were unclimbed for a reason: the rock was so friable that we named one area that we explored Weetabix Zawn to reflect the obvious danger of climbing such vertical rubbish. ‘Zawn’ is an old Cornish word that describes a sea cave at the back of a narrow inlet (Cornwall was the first place in the UK where climbing on sea cliffs became popular).

However, one area that I investigated with my colleague Keith Hazelaar was explored in the mid-1950s by two captains in the Green Howards, James Ward and John Bunnell. This was Promontory Rocks, which is located in the southeast of the New Territories. It is the obvious promontory linked to the mainland by a narrow isthmus shown on the following map, which I drew in 1974:

After Ward was killed in a motorcycle accident, Bunnell produced a guidebook to the climbs that the pair had pioneered together, in which it was suggested that the climbs they had done at Promontory Rocks were to be accessed by swimming (“spice is added to the approach”). I don’t think any of these climbs were ever repeated.

Another, more comprehensive, guidebook to climbing in Hong Kong was produced in 1968, but the section it contained on Promontory Rocks was repeated verbatim from Bunnell’s guide, so it is safe to assume that the author of the second guide never visited this area.

The situation began to change in the early 1970s, when Promontory Rocks came to the attention of noted alpinist Dick Isherwood, who was attracted to the massive slab of rock shown in the following photograph of Great Zawn (for an idea of scale, the hill had a spot height of 441 feet on maps of the period):

Isherwood pioneered two good climbs up the left-hand side of this big slab, although the best adjective to describe the approach, down the slope on the left of the photo, would be ‘dangerous’. Isherwood also attempted the obvious groove in the slab behind the inlet on the right, having reached the base of the climb by swimming across the zawn, but his attempt was repulsed by a difficult section near the top. Note that this inlet is referred to as ‘No. 1 Zawn’ on the above map, but when I finally started climbing on this section of the cliff in the 1980s, I decided to rename it the Devil’s Cauldron, because the noise level created by the ebb and flow of the swell in this zawn is almost overwhelming—it made communication with your climbing partner difficult, and it created a most intimidating atmosphere.

There are two reasons for wanting to attempt a rock climb that nobody has done before: the rather vain thought that you might be establishing a climb that everyone wants to do once a description has been circulated; and the desire to experience the tension created by uncertainty (is this climb actually possible?). Most of the climbs that I did with Keith Hazelaar between 1974 and 1976 failed to meet either criterion, but there is one route, which we climbed at the end of 1976, that would certainly justify a visit to this area (see below).

There is just one tiny problem: the above map has long been out of date, because since the late 1980s the area south and east of the fishing village of Po Toi O has been a golf course, and the last time I applied to the Clearwater Bay Golf and Country Club for permission to cross its land to access the climbing areas, I received a peremptory refusal. The fact that I was climbing here more than a decade before the club came into existence does not seem to have been considered a reason to grant such permission.

I imagine that it may be possible to hire a sampan in Po Toi O to reach the climbing—it was how we reached Promontory Rocks in the 1970s, when it was a two-hour walk from the nearest road, and a sampan across Clearwater Bay was the preferred choice. Mind you, some of the crossings were quite scary, given the relentless swell rolling in from the South China Sea. I remember that on one occasion we spotted a larger than usual wave coming towards us. The elderly man piloting the sampan, instead of pointing the boat into the wave, turned so that we were broadside on. We must have been very close to capsizing.

The photograph above shows the main climbing area; however, there is a lower, steeper section of cliff on the other side of the hill, facing in the opposite direction. This is the East Face, which is separated by a spectacular zawn from Cannonball Buttress. This latter feature was named by Bunnell and Ward, who called the climb they did Jolly Roger. Needless to say, Keith and I followed the nautical/piratical theme when naming the climbs we did on the East Face (Mainbrace, Black Spot, etc.), which at least made a change from the names we gave climbs on the main cliff. Keith was keen to name our climbs after characters and places in The Lord of the Rings, while I preferred names that reflected something of the nature of the climb.

On the edge of the spectacular zawn, at right angles to the rest of the East Face, is a narrow wall of rock that I thought might just be possible. However, I couldn’t reach the base of the wall at sea level, so instead I climbed the face directly above until it began to overhang. At this point, a line of handholds led round the corner onto the narrow wall. This is where the real difficulties started. First, the rock was caked with salt; it also felt surprisingly hot, being directly in the sun, so I kept leaving wet palm prints wherever I placed my hands. Second, the handholds were tiny, and I didn’t fancy trying to use them to make upward progress given the slimy feel engendered by the wet salt. Gymnastic chalk was not then in widespread use by climbers.

There was only one thing I could do. Wait. I’ve no idea how long I waited, but eventually the sun disappeared behind Cannonball Buttress, and the rock began to cool down. This made progress easier, but not easy. ‘Precarious’ springs to mind as an appropriate word to describe the rest of the climb.

“What are you trying to do? Give me bloody nightmares?” was Keith’s first comment on reaching the top.

And Nightmare was the only name I would accept for this climb, which is easily the best at Promontory Rocks. For anyone wishing to repeat it, the grade is E1 5b. I lost my best photographs of the climb many years ago, but here are two of Pete Hamer seconding the route in 1984 during an Outward Bound staff training session. The steepness is obvious. To spare him any possible embarrassment, I haven’t used the photo that was taken just as he reached the top. His eyes are bulging.

Although it isn’t possible to reach the base of the cliff in the Devil’s Cauldron by either scrambling or climbing, in 1983 it finally occurred to me that with a spare rope we could abseil (rappel) to the bottom. Consequently, I paid a visit with Pete Hamer and did three climbs: the groove that had defeated Isherwood, which we named Demon’s Groove (VS); The Alchemist (HVS 5a), which takes a parallel corner to the right; and Sultans of Swing (E1 5c). The following three photographs are of two unknown Chinese climbers on The Alchemist, taken during a visit I organized in the mid-1980s to let local climbers know about recent developments here.

Sultans of Swing takes the smooth slab right of the climber, while the diagonal crack to the left of the climber in the third photo is the line of Our Father (E1 5c), a climb that I did on a subsequent visit. If you do this climb, you will understand immediately why I gave it this name.

Keith Hazelaar and I explored Promontory Rocks fairly systematically in the 1970s, but we missed a few obvious lines, so I will conclude this post with three photographs of those missed opportunities. The first is of Pete Hamer seconding Pieces of Eight, on the East Face, on the first ascent. The second is of me climbing Autobahn, which is located on the section of cliff directly above Cannonball Buttress, while the third is of me on Rainmaker, an undercut groove at the outer end of Great Zawn.

Pieces of Eight (MVS).

Autobahn (HVS 5a).

Rainmaker (HVS 5a).

footnote
I have used the British grading system, which is the only one I’m familiar with. ‘VS’ is short for ‘very severe’, with prefixes ‘M’ for ‘mild’ and ‘H’ for ‘hard’. ‘E1’ is the easiest in what used to be the ‘extremely severe’ category (it now extends to E12, which is well beyond the ability of almost all climbers). The numbers are a technical grade for the hardest move on the climb.

Another guidebook to climbing in Hong Kong was produced in the late 1990s. I wasn’t in the territory at the time, but several local climbers told me subsequently that they had suggested to the authors that they contact me for information on climbs in this area. They never did, so the climbs referred to here remain undocumented, even though I had written (and typeset) a complete guide to the area in the 1980s, which also included the sea cliffs at the far end of the Sai Kung peninsula. It was never published.

a special relationship

Twenty-five years ago, give or take a few hours, Paula and I were running frantically through gridlocked traffic in Central on our way to an unmissable appointment, our wedding at City Hall. We’d been forced to abandon the car taking us to the ceremony, and we made it with very little time to spare.

A few months later, I introduced Paula to rock climbing in the Lake District. Given my age at the time, I felt that we’d be restricted to climbs graded no harder than ‘severe’, but on our third day out, having already climbed a couple of severes, Paula suddenly asked whether we could do something harder. Well, I managed to fiddle my way up a climb graded ‘very severe’ (VS), and a few days later we set off to do a climb that I’d identified as being at the low end of the VS range of difficulty.

That day didn’t quite go to plan, because someone was doing a climb that crossed our intended route, so I was forced onto another climb (described in Young Sid) that was at the top end of the VS range. Two weeks later, we were doing Kipling Groove, which is a grade harder, which I’d climbed twenty years earlier and which I’d never expected to do again.

The result of my wife’s not so subtle encouragement was that I ended up climbing at the highest standard in my entire climbing career during the 1990s, at a time when I had imagined myself to be past it. Consequently, mere thanks seem like a poor response. Nowadays, our principal physical activity is cycling, and for the most part the tables have been turned: I make sure that Paula is thoroughly cream-crackered after an outing, although I’m left in the same condition at the end of a day too, because I don’t believe in merely pootling along.

I’m not trying to put forward any kind of a blueprint for a successful relationship, but having activities that we enjoy doing together certainly helps. And we both liked intense physical activity before we met. And we haven’t had a real argument in years, although we have mock arguments all the time, because they’re much more fun than sitting in glum silence.

Anyway, I thought I’d post a few of my favourite photos of Paula from the last five years to celebrate twenty-five years together:

The first photo was taken shortly after we moved to Fanling and shows Paula holding a hot ngau lei so (cow’s lips), a type of deep-fried bread that is delicious hot, disgusting cold. The second shows Paula alongside an angels’ trumpets bush a short walk from our house that used to flower every couple of months when this photo was taken in 2011 but has since been cut down, while the third was taken on the same day in the cultivated area between our village and the eastern edge of Fanling. We like flowers.

Both these photos were taken at our friend Tom’s country store in the remote village of Sham Chung, which is the 36km halfway point on what I’ve previously described as a Saturday morning adventure. The first photo shows an empty plate (we never leave any of Tom’s pan-fried noodles) and two empty glasses, so we’re probably about to set off home.

I don’t expect to be around twenty-five years hence—there’s a strong possibility that I’d be dead already if Paula wasn’t around to keep me going. I’d certainly not be anywhere near as fit, so every new day is something to look forward to. More joke arguments; more fun.

* * *

This piece of music sums up how I feel today.

the new west

You see yon precipice—it almost looks
Like some vast building made of many crags,
And in the midst is one particular rock
That rises like a column from the vale,
Whence by our shepherds it is call’d, the Pillar.

William Wordsworth, The Brothers.

Pillar Rock, in Ennerdale, is one of the most spectacular pieces of rock architecture in the Lake District, second only to the summit crags of Scafell, a monstrous carbuncle on the northern flank of what is otherwise an unremarkable mountain. After our exertions on Corvus the previous year, it seemed like a fitting venue for another climb.

Following a number of failures, the Rock was first climbed by local shepherd John Atkinson on 9th July 1826, believed to be by a line now known as the Old West Route, which is no longer regarded as a rock climb. It is no coincidence that both this ascent and the earlier failures were by shepherds, because the topography of the Rock makes it fatally easy for sheep to wander across and jump down to ledges from which they subsequently cannot escape and must be rescued.

The route that I chose on this occasion was the New West Climb, pioneered by George and Ashley Abraham and two companions three-quarters of a century after the Rock’s first ascent. It was graded ‘difficult’ by the Abraham brothers, and it retains that grade now, although there are at least fifteen harder grades (depending on who you ask). It follows a line of grooves and chimneys on the right of the face shown on the photograph above, which is known to climbers as the West Face of High Man and which represents no more than a quarter of the full, precipitous extent of the Rock. According to the latest guidebook, it ‘finds its way through areas of rock usually reserved for harder climbs’.

Should a translation of this quote from the guidebook be needed, then I would point to the complete absence of big ledges on the climb, which have the effect of lessening the sense of exposure. In other words, for such an apparently easy climb, it is quite scary. There is another problem: Pillar Rock is one of the most inaccessible cliffs in the district, with a mandatory walk of several miles up the valley followed by a 2,000-foot slog up the hillside to reach the foot of the West Face. A tough assignment for a nine-year-old boy.

The following sequence of photos provides only a flavour of the climb.

The first part of the climb is neither steep nor difficult.

Getting steeper.

The start of ‘a fairly difficult groove’ (this is a quote from the 1968 guidebook).

Further up the ‘difficult groove’.

Approaching the top of the ‘difficult groove’.

An easy but exposed traverse connects one chimney with the next.

This one’s a tight squeeze.

Very exposed slabs near the top of the climb.

Just one more chimney and we’re at the top.

I suggested above that this was a tough assignment for a nine-year-old, but Siegfried completed the climb in good style. However, by the time we’d descended to the Forestry Commission road immediately below the Rock, it was obvious that he was flagging, so I told him to take a rest while I ran down the valley to the car. Although private cars are banned on such roads, I then drove back up the valley to pick him up. The New West Climb is one of only a handful of routes of this standard in the Lake District that are worth doing, and its remoteness is part of the attraction, but do make sure that you’ve enough left in the tank to complete the walk out. Had a key gate on the road up the valley been locked, which it should have been, then Siegfried would have had to walk all the way back to where I’d originally parked the car.

rigor mortis

Between 1974 and 1976, I spent almost all my free time exploring the ‘miles and miles of unclimbed sea cliffs’ that had lured me to Hong Kong (the quoted phrase formed part of a job advert for instructors at the local Outward Bound school). Most of this exploration was carried out with a colleague at the school, Keith Hazelaar, and we soon discovered that most cliffs were composed of loose, rotten, dangerous rubbish. This is because at the latitude of Hong Kong, chemical weathering predominates (mechanical weathering, which is the dominant type of erosion in more temperate latitudes, tends to produce cliffs that are more solid and more stable).

However, we did find some exciting climbs, and this is the story of one of them.

The island of Wang Chau is one of a group of four islands in the east of Hong Kong that forms part of the territory’s National Geopark (so designated in 2009). As an instructor at Outward Bound, I had had a chance, from the deck of the school’s motor launch, to reconnoitre possible climbing opportunities along the entire east coast of the Sai Kung peninsula. Most of these had been accessible overland, but in order to climb on Wang Chau, we would need logistical backup.

In March 1976, I persuaded one of the school’s seamanship instructors to give us a ‘lift’ to Wang Chau. This could be only an exploratory visit, to see if climbing there was even possible, and the section of the island we chose to investigate more closely is shown on the map above, on which the red asterisk marks the approximate position of the section of coastline shown in the following photograph.

The most obvious line is the huge chimney on the left of the photo, which we climbed on a subsequent visit, but I was immediately attracted to the slanting corner in the centre of the picture. It certainly didn’t look easy, but it did look possible.

The first problem was getting from the rescue inflatable onto dry land, although on this occasion it was easier than it usually is, given that out to the right of the photo it’s next stop America, and a big swell is usually running. We quickly scrambled up 6–7 metres to the top of a projecting beak of rock, which we immediately christened ‘the pulpit’ and where we could contemplate the corner at closer range.

There is a huge difference between consulting a guidebook, which provides a description and a grade of difficulty for any intended climb, and tackling a route that may turn out to be impossible. The eventual difficulty can only be guessed at in advance. However, the first few feet looked straightforward enough, as illustrated by the photo on the right, which was taken by Keith with a miniature camera that we used on such occasions.

The delusion that this might turn out to be easier than we’d originally anticipated lasted only as far as the first overhang, which I overcame by stepping up to the left then back right above the overhang. Retreat would now be more difficult, and the last move was only the start of the serious difficulties. The next photo, taken by our seaman colleague from the school’s inflatable, merely hints at just how difficult this section turned out to be.

Almost 40 years on, I can remember few details, except that upward movement became more and more difficult, until I reached the position shown in the photo, at which point I became stuck. I couldn’t work out what to do next, and I spent 45 minutes in that one position. Finally, by a series of precarious balance moves, I was able to reach the point shown in the next photo.

Although I had clearly overcome the crux of the climb, progress still wasn’t easy, and yet another problem began to impress itself on my mind. We were using 45-metre ropes, and on a long runout it’s customary for the second to shout out estimates of how much rope is left when it looks to be running out. I reached a suitable ledge with less than two metres to spare. The rest of the climb was easy.

I’ve written before of how it is the prerogative of the first climber to do a route to assign a name to that route. So what should I call it? I may not have felt that rigor mortis was about to set in after spending three-quarters of an hour in the same position, unable to move, but Rigor Mortis seemed an appropriate name nevertheless. We assigned a grade of extremely severe (E1), with a technical grade of 5c, and it is a fair bet that it has never been repeated.

There is a reason for that. In the 1990s, two expats put together a guidebook to climbing in Hong Kong, and several local climbers told them that they should speak to me. They never did, so to this day very few of the dozens of new climbs that I pioneered between 1974 and 1989 are known about. This one is certainly worth a visit. It wasn’t the best of the climbs that Keith and I did together—that was Nightmare, which is another story entirely.

a perfect day

I have a confession to make: I’m prone to what might be termed ‘impossible fantasies’. One such involves the idea that if I were afforded the opportunity to relive one day in my life, which day would I choose? The possibility might be nonexistent, but the choice would be easy: I would choose 19th July 1996. This is an account of that day.

The Esk Buttress is one of the most exciting cliffs to climb on in the Lake District. It is also one of the tallest, with an imposing central section almost 400 feet high, or 500 feet if the broken rock plinth that forms the base of the cliff is included. The rock is similar to that found a couple of miles away on Gimmer Crag in Langdale, meaning that it is steep but with a reasonable supply of sharp, incut handholds.

The cliff is marked on Ordnance Survey maps as Dow Crag, but by analogy with the East Buttress, higher up the same mountain (Scafell), it has always been known to climbers as the Esk Buttress. It is located in upper Eskdale, faces south and is two hours from the nearest road, overlooking a flat, boggy area known as the Great Moss.

As can be seen from the photograph, the central section, long called the Central Pillar by climbers, is flanked by steep but shorter walls on each side. The first attempt to climb this pillar was made by Alf Bridge in 1932, but after four pitches he was forced to scuttle off to the left by the steepening rocks above.

The leading pioneers of the 1940s, Arthur Dolphin and Jim Birkett, both made attempts on the pillar, but Birkett’s Great Central Climb (1945) dodges the main difficulty by escaping to the right, while Dolphin’s Medusa Wall (1947) is essentially a flanking attack up the left-hand side of the pillar.

By the end of the 1950s, the pillar had acquired the status of ‘last great problem’, which meant that it was attracting many attempts. The problem did not turn out to be one of extreme difficulty; the obvious line was blocked by a series of loose blocks, which would have been dangerous to climb over.

However, in 1962, Jack Soper, who was probably the first climber to dispel the myth of superhuman ability that surrounded legendary climber Joe Brown in the 1950s, abseiled down from the top of the cliff and trundled the offending blocks, planning to return the following weekend to complete the climb. Unfortunately for Soper’s plans, news of his exploits had reached the ears of his former climbing partner Peter Crew in Snowdonia.

Soper co-opted leading Langdale pioneer Allan Austin for his attempt, but when they arrived at the cliff, Crew was already halfway up the climb. However, Soper and Austin did not leave empty-handed. They found two excellent new ways up the left-hand side of the pillar, which they named Black Sunday and The Red Edge. One can safely assume that these names reflected their disappointment at being beaten to the main prize.

The Central Pillar was immediately given a grade of extremely severe, although by the mid-1970s, with the advent of training for climbing, this grade had become so congested that a new, open-ended system was introduced that initially replaced ‘extremely severe’ with five grades, E1 to E5 (there are now climbs graded E10). In this system, The Central Pillar was E2. The 1988 Scafell guidebook described it as ‘a superb climb with some exciting positions’.

The Central Pillar had always been high on my tick list of climbs to do, but I had never led any route of this standard. However, in August 1995, aged 49 and accompanied by my son Siegfried, I finally broke through this barrier with The Tomb, an E2 on Gable Crag, on the north side of Great Gable. Siegfried had climbed his first E1 only two days earlier.

It seemed like a good time to have a go at The Central Pillar, so on our next climbing trip we set off for the Esk Buttress. I thought that it would be prudent to ascend The Red Edge (E1) first, to see how well I was climbing. The Red Edge is one of those climbs that is not technically difficult for the grade, but such difficulties as are encountered are relentless, and the hardest moves come towards the end of a sustained 130-foot pitch, a long way from any moral support that may be provided by one’s second.

However, I bombed up the climb with no hesitation whatsoever. I sat at the top, taking in the rope and thinking about our next climb. When we had returned to the base of the cliff, the following conversation took place.

“Central Pillar next,” I said.

“I’m very tired,” Siegfried replied.

I hadn’t thought The Red Edge to be that strenuous, but Siegfried was only 16 at the time, so I decided not to push the point. Instead, we climbed one of Arthur Dolphin’s routes, Trespasser Groove, which follows a huge corner on the right of the Central Pillar and is a grade easier than The Red Edge. It is an excellent climb, but it turned out to be more difficult than I’d anticipated. I should have consulted the 1967 guidebook, which uses the word ‘awkward’ three times in its description of this route. ‘Awkward’ is, or should be, a red flag.

A few weeks later, Siegfried confessed that he hadn’t really been tired; he had merely been psyched out by the view of our intended route from below, and I do have to admit that the line of the climb does look intimidating. However, it’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good, and the positive outcome in this case was that a friend recommended I climb the direct start, which is the same grade as Trespasser Groove. The original route had followed the first four pitches of Bridge’s Route, which is a mere hard severe.

When we finally returned to the Esk Buttress the following year, we had already climbed nine E1s and one E2, so we were going well. We set off early because of the long walk to the crag. It turned out to be the hottest day of what was otherwise quite a poor summer. On our way to the crag, I remember that we passed a stream with a small waterfall, below which lay a deep pool. It was the perfect place to cool off.

The Central Pillar would be our first climb this time. Once we had organized our gear, there was one final ritual to carry out: the ‘performance-enhancing drug’, I used to refer to it as (I always carried a flask of strong black coffee whenever we went climbing, and psychological preparation is as important as physical preparation). We scrambled up 100 feet of broken rocks to a big ledge below the real start of the climb. As we uncoiled the ropes ready for action, I made a feeble joke about this being a ‘fry on the wall’ experience.

The first pitch of the direct start is steep but straightforward, and after almost 100 feet I reached the safety of a small ledge. Siegfried followed without encountering any serious difficulty. The second pitch soon reached the first ‘real’ pitch of the original route, which led to a ledge so small that it was obvious changing over would be awkward, to say the least. At this point, the face that we were climbing is severely undercut by Trespasser Groove, so the ledge feels extremely exposed and precarious.

And then it was time for the first of two hard but contrasting pitches. This one is what climbers call ‘delicate’, meaning that holds are small, and balance is more important than brute strength. Towards the end of the pitch, it is necessary to traverse off to the right, and I spent quite some time, ultimately without success, trying to fix a temporary anchor point so that Siegfried would have the benefit of a rope from above as he tackled the hard moves. He therefore faced a massive pendulum out over Trespasser Groove if he failed to make these moves.

The next stance is too small to be deemed a ledge; it is cramped and uncomfortable, and the rock above is much steeper than what had gone before. The second hard pitch starts with an apparently easy but precarious traverse to the right until a not very obvious line of weakness in the bulging rocks above is reached.

It was obvious that once I started upwards, it would be difficult to rest my arms, but the first few feet, though steep, are not particularly difficult. I reached a small ledge in the overhanging wall, at the back of which was an in situ piton. Despite my scruples about using such things, I clipped my rope into this one because I had no other protection, and I couldn’t see anywhere above where I could arrange more.

There was a large, hollow-sounding block—this is probably where the loose blocks that were removed by Soper were located—but draping a sling over it would have offered only psychological protection. I studied the rock ahead and spotted a large handhold only a few feet above the hollow block. That would be my target.

I grunted and heaved my way up the rock until I could curl my fingers over the large handhold. The problem was that I couldn’t curl my fingers over it. It was rounded rather than incut, and my immediate reaction was to retreat back to the piton to consider what to do next. I didn’t have much time, because I couldn’t rest my arms, so I eventually decided that rounded or not, the large handhold was the key to upward progress. I was right, and after a few more feet of steep ascent, the angle of the rock began to fall back, and I soon reached a big ledge and the end of the major difficulties. Later, Siegfried told me how impressed he’d been by my ascent of this pitch, not because of the technical difficulty but because protection had been so poor, and I’d faced a long fall if I’d come off.

The last pitch was enjoyable but easy in the context of an E2. The first thing I did was to take off my boots. I don’t subscribe to the conventional wisdom that rock boots should be two sizes smaller than one’s shoe size, but they still feel uncomfortable when worn continuously for three hours, the time it had taken to reach the top.

If The Central Pillar had been a cake, then we were about to enjoy the icing. Siegfried wanted to lead The Red Edge, which he did effortlessly. As we made our way down from this second climb, we saw that a large fog bank was rolling slowly up from the south, and we would have to be careful with navigation on our way back to the car. I don’t actually recommend this, but in this kind of situation my rule of thumb is that if you always go downhill wherever possible, you will eventually reach a place of safety, even if it isn’t where you intended to go in the first place.

There was only one other ritual to observe: a pint at the first pub we passed on the way home. It’s always fun to discuss the day’s climbing over a pint, but I have to drive home, so ‘pint’ must remain in the singular. The exorbitant price of drink in the tourist-thronged pubs of the Lake District is also a factor. And so ended what Siegfried and I have since agreed was our best ever day’s climbing together (and we had a lot of exciting days out in the mid-1990s, before Siegfried went on to university).

The Red Edge takes a direct line up the left-hand side of the sunlit section, while The Central Pillar tackles the white-streaked face directly below the highest point in the picture.

remember a day

In the summer of 1987, I took my eight-year-old son Siegfried rock climbing for the first time. The climb I chose to take him up is named Corvus and (unsurprisingly given the name) is located on Raven Crag in Borrowdale. It is graded difficult, which isn’t as daunting as it sounds, given that the original grade ‘difficult’ was #3 on a four-point scale devised in the 1890s (‘easy’ and ‘moderate’ are no longer considered proper rock climbs). It is 460 feet in length and was first climbed in 1950. Afterwards, I wrote a fictionalized account of our ascent, which I reproduce below:

Waiting for the bus: nervous talk of hard day ahead. Bus comes. Long journey down the valley. Leave bus at stone bridge over river. Path across rough pasture. After ten minutes of gentle uphill work, path meandering through open wood of gnarled and stunted oaks, the slope falls back beneath their feet. After a few more minutes, gradient imperceptible, they reach small gate in rough stone wall guarding entrance to the combe. The woodland gives way to bracken, coarse grass and heather as path continues through narrow valley, river bubbling on rocky bed below.

The open fellside, friendly as a giant in the summer sunshine, beckons. They pick a way along the rough track, skirting large boulders, sun warm on eager faces. The cliff, their destination, is concealed by shoulder of hill on their right. Rounding this, they stop. The imposing buttress stands, relaxed and easy, against the sunlit slopes of the surrounding hillside.

Feeling hot now. The boy is tired. Path is hard to see as it crosses jumbled scree slope. But they continue. Take wrong path: start to climb too soon. Return, energy wasted. Talk stops during final steep ascent to foot of buttress. Something has changed. The cliff now towers overhead, blotting out the sun. The boy is silent for a moment, then in cheerful voice talks of magnificent view, lake in distance, trees surrounding, more mountains.
The man examines the cliff, looking for way ahead. Narrow gully filled with moss and rushes. Easy, yes, but also wet, slippery and loose. Steep slab on left. Harder, but better option. Eat lunch now, no time later. The man uncoils the rope at base of slab. The boy ties one end around his waist, sits down to watch, and wait.

The man starts to climb V-shaped groove in slab, incut holds for fingers, rock rough for feet to grip. Thirty feet quite easily, then rock steeper. Traverse into gully on right. Good belay on chockstone. He takes stance at start of traverse to watch the boy.

Easy at first, but the boy is soon stuck. The man worries. Is the boy too young? Only eight years, and no experience. Rope tight. The boy stretches out his arm. Fingers curl over sharp edge of rock. Pull quickly. He soon reaches the chockstone. Congratulations. And encouragement—only eight more pitches to go.

“Up there next?”

“Up there next?”

Happier now, the boy points to steep, square corner in left wall of gully. Easier than it looks. Strenuous, but big holds. The man climbs quickly and safely to big ledge. The boy, now confident, follows. Hard work, talk unceasing.

Hard work, talk unceasing.

At the ledge, they pause to study the way ahead. Traverse across face on left, following narrow ledge. Easy, but requires care. They soon reach large rock bollard at foot of long, steep chimney. The boy is no longer nervous. Happy instead, he looks forward to tackling the chimney.

Starting the long chimney.

The man leads on, fingers cold. The chimney has many holds and is much easier than expected. Almost ninety feet to reach another ledge. The boy is slow, tiring already. At last he reaches the ledge. Five pitches remain.

Approaching the top of the long chimney.

The way is easier now, first across wide, muddy ledges, then easy slab. But now the crucial step lies directly ahead.

“The next bit looks hard!”

The boy studies the blank wall above them. Narrow crack leading across. No footholds.

“I’m not sure if I can do this, but I’ll try.”

Committed already. Retreat not an option from this position.

The man crosses the wall, swinging by his arms from crack. The boy follows, surprised to find excitement stronger than fear. The main difficulty now below them, the pair continue. Big ledges between pitches, going much easier.

Easier going: the penultimate pitch.

Now only one pitch remains. Quite steep, but many sharp handholds and footholds. Finally, after four hours, they reach the summit.

Quite steep, but many sharp handholds and footholds.

Sunlight provides its own reward. Relax in warmth. Return slowly to bottom of cliff. His first climb over, the boy is proud of his success. The man is proud of his son. Together, they hurry back down to the road to catch the bus.

The summit. The lake in the middle distance is Derwentwater, and the peak beyond is Skiddaw, one of only four mountains in the Lake District that are more than 3000 feet high.

If anyone is wondering whether Siegfried maintained an interest in rock climbing after this adventure, I offer the following photo, taken nine years later. He is about to make the hardest move on a climb called Gillette Direct on Neckband Crag in Langdale, which is graded extremely severe (E2). It involves relying on an extremely insecure, rounded dimple as a foothold as you reach for a good hold above. I fully expected my foot to slip off at this point, and Siegfried’s did, so that he swung out into space to the left, from where he couldn’t get back onto the rock, so I had to lower him back to the ground. He succeeded at the second attempt.