Climbing the Lake District's Pillar Rock
Cumbria's Lonely Valley is the Setting for One of Its Biggest Crags
Sep 8, 2009
From Wasdale, one can see the Needle, but with difficulty, and only if its precise position is known. The Pinnacle, though clearly visible, loses its prominence by being surrounded by the other great rock faces of Scafell. In contrast, Pillar Rock rises like a giant thumb from the side of its mountain, visible from almost every corner of Ennerdale.
Even on a fine day, the solitude of the upper reaches of Ennerdale is complete. When mists creep over the fells, this can turn to a brooding stillness. On such a day, Pillar Rock looms out of the lower tendrils of cloud, a sinister presence in a scene almost of foreboding.
Early Ascents of Pillar Rock
Two hundred years ago its awesome splendour forced its way into the romantic imagination when Wordsworth likened it to “a vast building made of many crags”. And as romanticism sought physical expression in mountain climbing, the rock exerted a strong attraction to the adventurous. While the sport of rock climbing claims the ascent of Napes Needle, in 1886, as the moment of its birth, that of its conception might be seen in the ascent of Pillar Rock, by local shepherd, John Atkinson, 60 years earlier.
From the west, the rock appears as a shapely tower, with a shoulder known as Low Man, at half height. Leading up to the shoulder, from the right, is the broken scramble of the Old West Route, the probable line of Atkinson’s ascent. It is likely that many of the early explorations were done by shepherds, who may have wandered across the ledges on the east side, in pursuit of sheep, and perhaps continued to the summit. Records of these climbs no longer exist, but by the time of the sixth known ascent, in 1850, a bottle, containing the names of earlier visitors was to be found at the top.
Pillar's Emergence as a Rock Climbers' Crag
By the 1870s the rock had been climbed more than a hundred times. Four different routes to the summit had been discovered. In 1882, W.P. Haskett-Smith, the conqueror of Napes Needle, began an assault on Pillar. He started with a series of short climbs on the wall above Jordan Gap, the fissure that separates the rock from the mountain. He also made some extremely adventurous forays onto the bigger faces, culminating in the ascent, in 1891, of the North Climb, 350 feet in length, and the first major route on the rock.
The decades either side of the turn of the century saw a rise in the popularity of climbing. Pillar played a large part in the evolution of the sport, with the principle figures, O.G. Jones, the Abraham brothers, Fred Botterill and others contributing to its exploration. By 1913, there were more than two dozen climbs on its faces. The war brought a six-year lull in activity, as elsewhere in the Lakes.
Climbing Development Between the Wars
In 1919, perhaps to make up for lost time, a determined assault was opened, under the leadership of H.M. Kelly and C.F. Holland. During that intense year, they added six important climbs to the total. Two of these, which remained for many years among the hardest in the area, were named ‘Sodom’ and ‘Gomorrah’. The names were altered to the unimaginative Route 1 and Route 2 to accommodate the sensibilities of the Fell and Rock Climbing Club, who published the official guidebooks to the Lake District. The original names were only restored in the 1970s edition of the guide.
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, a trickle of routes continued, at a rate of about one a year. This was followed by two decades of almost complete neglect. The main impetus of exploration had moved onto the smaller, valley crags, with climbers finding little to induce them to undertake the lonely walk to the long, dark walls of Pillar.
Pillar Rock in the 1960s
The isolation ended, for a time, in 1963, when a group of climbers from the Whitehaven-based, and appropriately named Pillar Mountaineering Club, began a ten-year siege of the rock. The principle activists in this phase, G. Cram, W. Young, C. Eilbeck and R. Schipper, were all schoolboys when they began what came to resemble a war of attrition, which added more than thirty new routes to the total, most of which were considerably harder than anything previously climbed there.
In recent years, the silence has returned. A pair of climbers on the rock are likely to have it all to themselves. They have needed determination to come here, and the climb they are tackling will require a sustained effort over several hours. Yet as they sit on the summit, vertical faces falling away on all sides, they will feel privileged to share, for a brief time, the neighbourhood of the ravens.
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