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 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?