Pennine Lines w/c 22 January 2024
Some words in the climbing world are so loaded with history and expectations that it’s impossible to actually assess the place objectively. Words that carry a lot of baggage one way or another. Just saying “Plantation” will elicit a response of some sort. It might spark memories of feeling like a hero cruising confidently on some airy line or other above a sea of onlookers, or finally solving the critical position and landing the top hold on your project as the winter sun sneaks out from behind a cloud. Or backing off Crescent Arête with trust in your footwork in tatters. An ankle-wrecking fall from high up on something, feet rapidly peddling an invisible bike down some tall arête, with the rest of your climbing year flashing before your eyes perhaps. Yep, the highs are high, and the lows are low at the Plantation. The soaring bulletproof arêtes, and the sandy battered orange holds and snappy flakes. Or maybe you’ve never been, so it’s a crag of the imagination yet to be experienced, which you’ve avoided because you’ve heard it’s always rammed.
Pennine Lines w/c 15 January 2024
With the Millstone arête, I’ve not been on it, and you probably haven’t either, so we don’t really know. And to be honest, maybe it’s fine that certain things remain unclimbed. Sometimes these lines have as much value in their status as tantalising possibilities than they do as realised routes. They are nobodies route, nobody has their name on it in a guide, but simultaneously they belong to everyone. A great leveller. Maybe it HAS been climbed and whoever it was just didn’t tell anyone, now there’s a thought. Unclimbed lines leave possibilities open in the imagination, and these days climbing is so well documented, classified, instagrammed, videoed and photographed (guilty!) that sometimes there’s little space left for the imagined.
Pennine Lines w/c 8 January 2024
In fact, Rivelin is a classic winter venue, THE January crag. I swear some years have passed where it’s the only place I’ve found dry rock. Low lying and sheltered, yet open enough for that fine grained rock to dry fast; it’s a sun trap too and rarely feels as grim and bleak as other Sheffield local moorland crags. On a dull day it can seem like a brown crag for those brown January days, so it just fits. But it's even better when the low winter sun rakes through the bare trees, the light modelling the crag, shadows are cast and everything pops into relief. BOOM.
Pennine Lines w/c 27 November 2023
There’s often a lot said about the ‘perfect gritstone day’, typically implying solid clear blue sky and the sun out. Even better; the crag bathed in the last orange light of day, with someone heroically questing up a highball spine-chiller, as above. Classic gritstone, you can’t knock it.
You’ll see a lot of these on social media, living your best life, inspirational content etc etc. You can’t move for it when it happens. During the long dark drudgery of winter that little window of sunshine can do wonders for the soul, and conversely it’s guaranteed to make the blood boil of anyone unable to get out, stuck at work or whatever. But it’s not all about the perfect. Perfect is the enemy of good.
Pennine Lines w/c 16 October 2023
When you first start out in climbing you improve pretty fast. So your available universe of Things To Do expands away from you at an exponential rate. Every time you go climbing you get better and better, and the almost infinite possibilities offered by the world of climbing await you, like one of those big kids’ play mats with all the roads and houses and shops printed onto it being unrolled in front of a toddler with a box full of new toy cars. Every guidebook you open is like unfolding the menu of your local takeaway having just discovered that Indian food exists. A kaleidoscope of possibilities which will take you three lifetimes to devour.