Pennine Lines w/c 15 January 2024
|| Sunny and cold || This is it ||
Unclimbed or perhaps unclimbable arête || Millstone Edge
|| Focus On... ||
The Unclimbed
How many of us like to think that we’ve totally got a grip on climbing, we’re well balanced, we ride the ups and downs with ease and we certainly don’t let climbing dictate our our moods and general emotional well-being? It’s all chill, we’ve got this.
As I sit typing this in a foul mood with a hopefully-not-too-knackered knee that went crunch very loudly at the crag, I can of course confirm all the above is nonsense. Especially if this coincides with the first week of decent weather since October. Anyway, as a distraction from the inevitable psyche graveyard that is injury I thought I’d offer up this future line for consideration, and as reminder that it both exists and is still unclimbed.
At the untrendy end of Millstone, far from the fancy-dress circus of Master’s Edge and sitting outside the bag-of-dog-muck-on-a-fencepost blast radius of Surprise View carpark, this arête of relatively modest stature has been a well-known unclimbed prospect for years. Various theories circulate in climbing folklore about this one; ranging from theorising that it should be fine with all the pads these days, to it being easy-but-then-the-holds-run-out and there’s nothing but a dyno for the top. Or maybe it is just unclimbable. What we can be sure about is that most people won’t have bothered to try it, myself included.
This is actually one of the secret weapons in the local developer’s arsenal; simply the fact that most people just don’t try obvious stuff. So time and time again we see that fairly well-known Last Great Problem type lines go untested, especially if things look or are presumed to be ones for the next generation, or the generation after that. Or conversely if something looks too easy to bother cleaning up it also won’t get attempted. In fact often the more well known the project is, the more blatant and outstanding the line, the less attempts it will see, perhaps as it’s assumed that it must have already been tried enough and written off already. We can find ourselves stuck in a sort of eddy of circular logic, complacency and laziness. Either way, our inaction is a win for the keen developer.
Quarry building || Millstone Edge
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.
Facing out across Callow, with Stanage visible in the distance, free from the aid climbing peg scars and old bolts of the rest of Millstone, this unclimbed arête also prompts you to imagine what the place was like pre-quarrying, what sort of buttress was cleaved open to reveal this sweep of slab, what sort of natural crag or edge line was here at Millstone that made the quarrymen decide it was a prime spot to tear the land open and remove millions of tons of rock - must have been a pretty decent sized outcrop of some description! Concrete remnants of the industrial infrastructure are still visible in the woods below the quarried bays of the crag, a reminder of the scale of the operation.
So whether or not that arête can be climbed one day, it’s still a cool place to come at dusk, away from the crowds, watching out for the ghostly swoosh of the barn own darting across the fields below, and do a bit of imagining. And if it CAN be climbed, well, let me know and I’ll bring out the big camera…
|| Recently Through the lens ||
Fleeting golden winter light on the Eastern edges.
|| Fresh Prints ||
A couple of very cold morning scenes from just above Millstone Edge in the Print Shop.
