
Pennine Lines w/c 24 March 2025
Of course some of you already know what to expect, and still don’t get on with it. The Pavlovian response mechanism in you, conditioned from previous seasons ill-prepared for Peak limestone, lead you to think the holds are grim and uncomfortable, the crags all dusty humid glue-covered grief-holes with slugs taking up residence in every low-lying slot and pocket. The good news here is the conditioning can be broken. This dislike of Peak limestone, like all weaknesses, can be trained to turn it into a strength. This is where the psychology comes in, because you need to understand your aesthetic benchmarks and enjoyability-mean-sea-level are out of whack due to years of, say, ‘enjoying’ expertly set indoor climbing on smooth uniform holds, or simply by swanning off to tufa-drenched Mediterranean sport climbing utopias every winter. It takes time, but you can reconfigure yourself.

Pennine Lines w/c 3 March 2025
When bouldering mats became commonplace in the late 1990s and early 2000s, one of the oft-cited benefits offered up as an excuse for lugging a huge square of foam around (largely to placate the “you’re all going soft, we used to do these problems with just a bar towel stolen from the pub” crowd) was that by using bouldering pads we were protecting the ground from further wear, stopping the grass being battered by repeated falls etc etc. Win win - what selfless legends were were! However, far from being a ‘win’ for erosion, pads clearly just served to enable the whole activity, making it an enjoyable mainstream prospect for all climbers year-round, not just the preserve of fringe nutcases with cast-iron ankles, lowball traverse fans, and cutting edge players needing a training option in the summer - the only time the landings were dry enough to stand on. Hence the massive boom in bouldering participation over the last two decades, with a commensurate strain on the land. Bigger numbers now means at certain places we’re seeing massively accelerated erosion, and it won’t just sort itself out, it’s going to need some legwork from all of us.

Pennine Lines w/c 24 February 2025
It doesn’t hurt that such a full-day immersion in complete bouldering all-you-can-eat gluttony is reminiscent of the fabled “first day in Font” vibes of yore. Arriving in the Forest already dehydrated by 8 hours of driving, fuelled only by coffee, beaucoup pains au chocolate and what scant sleep you managed to scrape whilst lying on the floor of the lounge in a budget ferry whilst being stepped over by various chain-smoking continental lorry drivers, the stage is set for an epic day of climbing. With no concession made to saving any energy or skin, and - with smartphone weather forecasts still a full decade in the future - no way of knowing what the next few days will bring other than a half-remembered forecast, all bridges are burned on the first day. With elbows duly wrecked by locking between the chipped slots on the Cuvier red circuit, the hope is that those bridges can be at least partially reconstructed later that night by judicious use of fingertape, ibuprofen and antihydral. Rinse and repeat for seven consecutive days. Bon chance.

Pennine Lines w/c 4 February 2025
We tread between stones placed with a purpose, we climb among carved curiosities, gutters, lintel slots, reminder that we’re not the first to be drawn to these places. To find them special in some way, to attach significance to them, a link to the past and the future is felt. And it’s not just us seeking a quiet bit of refuge in the woods; approaching the boulders something dark and muscular is disturbed, and swiftly disappears away, antlers deftly weaving between the trees as we stumble clumsily through the undergrowth with ungainly slabs of foam on our backs.

Pennine Lines w/c 20 january 2025
But, we’re back regardless, nose to the grindstone…..a grindstone made out of grit - what else? So what’s been going down? The big news of the new year period was that Smiling Buttress received its long-awaited second ascent from Alex Moore. It looks like the new beta and padding setup makes it less of a logistical headache, and crucially less deathly, so maybe this will open the floodgates to more repeats? Even if not, it’s great to see the line get the attention it deserves, because it is a mega piece of rock. The arête immediately to the right just needs climbing now - from what I hear it’s almost all ’there’.

Pennine Lines w/c 16 December 2024
Alright folks I'm going to keep this short; I've got presents to go out and buy, I need to source a replacement dipped headlamp bulb, and the weather is terrible etc etc. But as Christmas falls on the 25th this year, meaning it all kicks off next week, we'll be taking a hard-earned break from Pennine Lines over what Americans excruciatingly refer to as the "holiday period". Instead of writing these emails I am putting the time saved into leaning heavily into consuming dried-fruit-based foodstuffs, marzipan, and beer. However, Pennine Lines is never far from my mind, so as I did last year I'm going to be asking you to do something for me for once, namely click here and give us your thoughts on what you want to see in these emails in 2025.

Pennine Lines w/c 9 December 2024
It’s cold, maybe too cold? Turn a cheek to the wind and glance - well, squint - across the moor to the jumble of gritstone boulders silhouetted on the horizon. Gonna be even colder up there. Is the cloud level going to play ball? The hours spent checking and re-checking weather forecasts at least confirms that this is exactly as anticipated. Should be the right conditions for it, on paper at least. That bodes well, perhaps this is the day after all. Could do without leaving empty handed this time, it’s a bit soul destroying. You wonder if you’d have been better off going elsewhere. Cue frantic waving of arms in an effort to pump blood into the fingers, the first of many such episodes.

Pennine Lines w/c 2 December 2024
So having witnessed this bewildering rise in standards over the last twenty years or so (much of it actually occurring in the last five-to-ten years) it’s therefore reassuring to find that some things are still the same; The Ace is still quite hard. The holds might have improved, the top jug might have snapped off and been glued back on, the landing might have been extended and improved, the rock in front of it might have been toppled and then put back, pads might be twice as thick now and sequences might have changed, everyone might have been training specifically for it on replica holds now, and it might even have been flashed a few times, but despite all that it’s still quite hard. The baggy S7 strides might be gone (sadly), and Anasazis no longer rule the roost (again, sadly), but one remaining sliver of former certainties still remains; The Ace is still quite hard. It still gives the best a rough ride. No wonder Jim was so pleased.

Pennine Lines w/c 25 November 2024
It wasn’t by accident that I pretty much skipped over the Plantation in Grit Blocs; I hate that it gets busy, and can’t stand to see the trashing it gets when people climb when it hasn’t fully dried, and the way the rock quality often isn’t as strong as the lines. Never really been comfortable with the proliferation of fairly poor landings, and hate how the few flat areas beneath classics are eroding away once again, with the BMC-coordinated ground work seeming like a distant memory (checks notes - it was 2005/6, which explains why it feels a long time ago). I hate the way the rock has an especially nasty habit of tearing fast-moving fingertips to shreds in slightly-too-warm weather. The way you’ve basically always got to be on your game is brutal and uncompromising, unreasonable. And when the smothering bracken is up in summer, and the wind drops? Hate that.

Pennine Lines w/c 18 November 2024
Last night’s snow fell on gritted dry roads, with recent high ground temps, and hence there shouldn’t be be much problem getting out today. However, it’s always worth remembering that the main roads and the bus routes are your safest bets. So from Sheffield the A57 out of Crosspool towards Rivelin is a reliable route, as is the main A6187 Hathersage Road out to the Peak via Fox House - this is a busy wide road with regular buses so is always well gritted and it takes a lot of snow to make this one impassable, meaning you can often access crags like Burbage South, Millstone, Lawrencefield, Mother Cap and Secret Garden OK, and with a bit of a walk the rest of the Burbage Valley too.

Pennine Lines w/c 11 November 2024
One thing I’ve been pondering whilst eating up the motorway miles is the sometimes rather uncomfortable status which eliminate problems occupy in British climbing. This has been brought into focus during visits to some of these iconic old-school venues like The Bowderstone and Dumbarton, not to mention Peak Limestone. Talking to people at various crags it’s clear everyone has a different take on eliminates, ranging from leaning very heavily into them, to completely denouncing them. Climbing is supposed to be about taking the line of least resistance to the top, anything else is just stupid, right? While I recognise this is a topic which warrants a more detailed dive than I will offer up here today, I’ll offer up a few points for consideration.

Pennine Lines w/c 4 November 2024
It doesn’t matter if you’ve done everything before, there’s always sport to be had, always a traverse or a variation to be enjoyed, the almost-lost-art of playfulness and creativity still rules here. On a quick hit on a marginal day everything is a bonus, there’s no such thing as wasted time. Everything is a win - at least you didn’t give up and go indoors.

Pennine Lines w/c 21 October 2024
The quarries at Rivelin particular are one of those venues where nobody can ever come up with a good reason why the place is never that popular, unjustifiably so, given it’s potentially a reliable winter option when stuff is clean. Hence it tends to get periodically rediscovered by a new generation every few years. Those around in the 2000s will fondly remember a few routes appearing in Dan Honeyman’s films, and it’s been the scene of several brief but frenzied renaissances since then. At some point a critical mass must be reached and it obtains sustained traffic, surely? It can’t be far off. Right now there’s lot of brambles and undergrowth to negotiate but also some outstanding rock architecture. For the bold trad devotees there’s plenty to go at, but even if you’re ‘only’ bouldering there’s a few classics to check out - most obviously the problems around Happy Campus / No Class, the ‘popular end’ of the crag. But it’s worth picking your left leftwards along through the various quarried bays and eyeballing some of the blank slabs and walls.

Pennine Lines w/c 14 October 2024
As I have mentioned in previous emails and on Instagram, I am excited to be able to unveil this one to you, the loyal subscribers to my weekly email. This is a calendar of my Peak landscape images from what I think of as my neck of the woods - the eastern gritstone edges and the central limestone. It's an area close to my heart and I know it’s a special place for a lot of you too, so I hope this collection of images does the place justice but also drops in a few surprises for you. The final selection of images will stay under wraps until the calendars ship, but what I can say is none of these images have been available for sale before in any form, and all twelve images for this are shot on 5x4” transparency film. This is something I mention a lot, so for the non-photographers out there who might not be down with the terminology, what exactly does this exactly mean?

Pennine Lines w/c 7 October 2024
Anyone ever noticed that when you take a trip away you still end up homing in on the most grit-like problems wherever you go? Crafnant Arete is an obvious example which wouldn’t be out of place at any gritstone crag, and rewards the old staying-composed-up-high grit mindset. The entire Crafnant boulder jumble is one of those venues with quite a few of these really. Topographically the place is a sort of uber-treacherous huge talus field, but once on the rock the coarse texture and rounded shapes take you right back to the grit. It’s very much like a more inconveniently located Welsh cousin to Carrock Fell in that regard, but instead of being roadside Crafnant is right at the end of a very long and narrow single track road to the head of the valley. If anything there’s actually less climbing there than you might expect at first, but what there is is very good, and it has to be said there’s some VERY striking lines hanging above the boulders on the crag above.

Pennine Lines w/c 30 September 2024
This is actually potentially one of the strengths of climbing in particular - alongside photography, which is often overlooked. Once the pads are down under the project, or once the clips are in, or the tripod is up waiting for some fleeting light, you’ve got time to look around, hear the sounds, watch the weather pass, see the light change, feel the breeze blowing. You don’t necessarily get this with all outdoor pursuits, as you’re often moving from place to place. I can think of a few where you don’t, but the more mainstream stuff like walking, running, mountain biking, skiing you tend to be on the move. Again, this is not ‘wrong’, and as someone who’s climbed at Sean’s Roof recently I concede that not all places reward efforts to sit and quietly contemplate, but often climbing can give you space to find a subtley different way of experiencing a place.

Pennine Lines w/c 23 September 2024
The culture of considering bouldering as only being worthy as training for routes persisted well into this century, and it carried over into indoor climbing too. In fact it wasn’t until the mid to late 2000s that you could turn up at an indoor wall as a beginner and do any beginner-level or easy bouldering at all. It just wasn’t catered for. The easier climbing was on ropes, and that was that. In retrospect this was odd, but it just reflected the prevailing trends at the time. Bouldering was supposed to be hard, to be training, you were supposed to serve an apprenticeship of “proper” climbing on ropes. You weren’t really supposed to do bouldering to the exclusion of all else.

Pennine Lines w/c 15 September 2024
I have to say actually receiving a physical copy came as something of a surprise, as part of my personal magazine expectations baked into my psyche stem from the late 2000s. In many ways this era ushered in the decline of the UK climbing magazines, where along with not being paid very much for image use in magazines in the first place (that is if you got paid at all, or paid without having to chase them up a few times first) I distinctly remember actually having to go out and cough up a few quids worth of that hard-won cash and buy a physical copy of the magazine to even see your my work in print - hardly surprising then that a lot of us just stopped bothering submitting images to the mags. So it was great to see a couple of my images in print again in Klettern, although it does expose the fact that my grade C in GCSE German doesn’t go very far these days in terms of actually reading the magazine. Still looking for an article containing directions to the Bahnhof, taking the first straße on the left, then ordering two beers and a coffee mit sahne.

Pennine Lines w/c 9 September 2024
At this time of year I am always reminded of 2021 when, with the summer fading and gritstone prospects looking better, I embarked on the rollercoaster ride of going out up and down the Pennines shooting images for - and writing - Grit Blocs. The first dedicated photoshoot specifically for the book was down at Cratcliffe and Stanton with Gwyneth, who climbed superbly despite having about fifteen taped-up fingertips. If you can imagine climbing Egg Arete in gloves, then you’re getting close to it. But anyway, the crag of choice was fairly indicative of Septembers for me, when I look back through my September photo folders of old.

Pennine Lines w/c 2 September 2024
Let’s not linger on the fading daylight hours, that’s a given, but at this time of year there’s space to imagine if it’s going to be one of those vintage autumns. Cool and dry, the gritstone feeling crisp under the skin after the sweaty grind of summer, shoe rubber feeling sticky, and the limestone crags staying dry well into November. Confidence running high, momentum building, and maybe a few long-term projects will fall? We must be due a good ‘un after the last couple of warm and damp autumns. Last year in particular was terrible but I’m determined to not look back in anger.