|| Windy and mild || Feeling more autumnal ||

Crisis, Hawkcliffe || Climber: David Mason

|| Focus On... ||

Yorks vs Peak

Firstly some progress towards my plans (NOT goals) outlined on 4th Sept - Hawkcliffe has been visited. An unexpected early success! Just goes to show if you write stuff down then things happen.

Hawkcliffe was a bit of a surprise really for more than one reason - I was not expecting such an impressive crag, for such a relatively obscure venue. The rock architecture is formidable; there’s some HUGE buttresses and big bold looking routes with the odd peg (pegs that I assume whoever placed them wouldn’t have gotten away with at a more popular grit crag). The ramparts of fine-grained rock emerge from a steep tangle of rhododendrons, moss covered bushes, slippy travelator-like mud and abandoned conference-venue chairs. It’s like Wharnecliffe meets Gladiators in a crack lounge.

It also felt weirdly familiar for a moment. Having slogged up the hillside we emerged right at the foot of the route Blood On The Shamrock, which despite having given it no thought at all for a good 15 years or so the route was immediately recognisable from Dan Honeyman’s cult climbing film from the 2000s, The Shock Of The New (which if you haven’t watched, you should). Funny how these things stick with you.

But we weren’t here to thrown ourselves up bold routes in bootcut cords, we were just here to kick off the grit season with a bit of bouldering (in shorts!), which I won’t bore you with the details of but needless to say it’s a pretty unique place to explore and some good climbing is there to be had, and the place definitely isn’t “worked out” by any means.

Someone was expecting a long belay session || Hawkcliffe

One topic of discussion during the day, and one which comes up time and time again, is the issue of the relative ‘character’ of Yorkshire bouldering compared to the Peak. The commonly held belief which I’ve heard expressed by various people over the years is that in Yorkshire the problems are somehow more basic/steeper/positive, and the stuff in the Peak is more weird/slopey/techy. I’ve always found this to be an interesting theory, but it’s a hard one to pin down any hard facts about. There’s a few issues or factors with this which I will attempt to unpack here but I’m keen to hear from others on this, so if you’ve got a strong opinion on the following then reach out via the usual channels.

Firstly the obvious issue is I’m only seeing one side of this, being Peak-adjacent rather than being based in West or North Yorks. So I’m always visiting Yorkshire crags as a day tripper, as are many of the people I have conversations with locally, and it’s perfectly possible that as interlopers maybe we’re all just gravitating to quick predictable and reliable ticks hence that’s where the perception comes from. So we’re tourists avoiding the weird technical stuff, and in fact the character of the bouldering is pretty much the same between Peak and Yorkshire. Of course if this is the case then the flip side is you’d also expect Yorkshire climbers to regard the Peak as basic/steep/positive and their home turf as weird/techy. I suppose the ultimate arbiters of this must be visitors to both areas from further afield, ideally due east or west so there’s no travel bias. Climbers in North Wales and Hull; I’m looking at you!

The other theory is maybe the reputation stems from a comparison of a limited number of venues within a specific grade range at a given formative point in time. So if you replace “Yorkshire” and “Peak” in our hypothesis with “Earl, Almscliff, Ilkley and Caley” and “Stanage, Burbage, The Roaches, and Cratcliffe” and only look at established grade low 7s to low 8s circa the late 2000s (i.e. when internet use exploded) then maybe just maybe there’s something in it? A logical extension of this theory might be that the bulk of the heavy lifting is being done by a few blue riband landmark problems. What’s the most famous 8a in Yorkshire? Zoo York or Jason’s Roof. What’s the most famous 8a in the Peak? The Joker or Careless Torque. From that comparison you could maybe see where the belief comes from.

The Ace / Joker at Stanage || Climber: Martin Smith

I suppose the obviously fly in this theory’s ointment is that “Yorkshire” in climbing terms covers a huge area with a remarkably varied range of gritstone sub-types each with their own character. And although geographically more concentrated there’s still a wide spectrum of grit types in the Peak too, so the odds of an overriding character split emerging based around whether a given crag is north or south of the M62 seems low. Also, there’s been a massive boom in development of bouldering in both the Peak and further north in the last 15 years or so, with loads of new crags and new problem emerging, developed through the eyes of an ever-increasing cast of local developers. Problems which diverge from the established venues and accepted norms, so I’m not convinced there’s an overriding character at all now.

Of course it could just be that the assertion that the Peak has more technical climbing (and by implication, better climbing) was just a flex by the old “Sheffield Mafia” to keep the Yorkshire crew in their place. We’ll never know, as in the internet age of democratisation of media and the near-death of print magazines I don’t think the Sheffield Mafia exists any more. It’s more a set of smaller dissident factions each vying for power and relevance in the face of an increasingly pluralist climbing worldview - maybe only existing now in the form of the Real Sheffield Mafia, the Provisional Sheffield Mafia and the Continuity Sheffield Mafia. So if I see any of those three guys out and about I’ll ask them.