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.