Rock-climbing in the English Lake District / Third Edition

by Owen Glynne Jones

One fine morning we heard that another party were driving down the valley on their way to the Great Gully. They offered us seats in their wagonette. We gladly accepted, and had a pleasant drive along the lakeside as far as Wastdale Hall. The walk round to the foot of our climb occupied us the best part of half an hour, and we then left our friends to continue their journey, arranging to look out for them at the top of the Screes a few hours later.

The gully was easy at the outset, but far up above us we could see difficulties in plenty, and we began the scramble with a sense of future bliss that rather detracted from our present enjoyment.

We passed up on the left-hand side of the first pitch at 11-18, over fifteen feet of steep grass and rock. The holds were fairly good beside the waterfall. A few feet further on the gully narrowed at a second pitch—a steep gutter down which the stream endeavoured to smooth a way. We could use ledges on either side, and at the top a tree-stem that has lain there for some years gave us assistance. The pitch is about twenty-five feet high.

Then there followed two easy ten-feet bits before we found ourselves compelled at the fifth pitch to quit the bed of the gully. This obstacle sent us off to the left up a steep grass bank before we could traverse back into the narrow chimney at an assailable spot. We were obliged to use our knees for wedging safely in the V-shaped corner, and thus had our introduction to the water-way. The ledges were few and slippery. Ten feet up the corner a jammed stone and a slippery slab guarded the head of the pitch. We reached the former actually behind the water, and hastened out to the left with but slight steadying holds for the hands.

Then we halted a little and looked about us. We had gone through the preliminaries, and realized that our gully was now getting stiff. The view upwards showed the great seventh pitch, but nothing higher. Far below we could see the end of the lake. The prospect was not nearly so fine as that from the Great Gully; the rocks were not so boldly carved out, nor the outlook so fair.

The next obstacle was formed by a jammed boulder thirty feet high, impossible to climb direct. It would perhaps have been best to take it on the right, but we advanced tentatively up the other side, and then, seeing that it would just go, kept on to the top. Our route lay up the narrow crack between the boulder and the side wall. A shoulder was useful for the leader at the start, but he had a bad six feet just above. The only hold for the right hand was obtained by clenching the fist inside the crack so as to form a wedge. A far-away notch in the wall gave an oblique push-off for the left foot, the struggle being mainly to keep close to the crack.

The difficulties now became almost continuous, and we were unable to define exactly the beginning of the seventh pitch. Some twenty feet of steep climbing up the bed of the ghyll first followed and we reached a little platform whence a branch gully of steep grass led out on the buttress to our left. The main gully was thirty feet across, narrowing a little higher up. An almost vertical rib of rock some six feet thick divided the gully into two parts. That on the right was a wide recess roofed in by a great stone nearly a hundred feet overhead. From our little platform we could see the water streaming over the edge of the roof, and forming a thin veil at the entrance to the cave. The left-hand side of the rib was a narrow crack sloping back at an angle of about 45°, but after the first thirty feet continuing to the top perpendicularly. The route we chose lay first up the crack, then across the rib and into the cave. A second start being made from there, we proposed to climb up the vertical rib, taking to the crack on its left whenever the difficulties became extreme. At the level of the roof of the cavern we were to traverse across on to it and make directly up its smooth slope and round by the left of a higher jammed block that overhung the finishing portion of the pitch. I think the route differs a little from that of the first party, who were somewhat assisted by a jammed stone then in the crack. In fact one member considered the stone essential for a successful ascent, and that its untimely removal closed the upper half for ever. But there can be no doubt that in a dry season the obstacle can be overcome by a moderately strong party, and that in the normal ‘streamy’ state of the gully the climber needs but the knowledge of a route and the nerve to follow it without hesitation and without regard to dryness.

I.

PLATE VI.