First Ascents That Shaped British and Irish Climbing
Climbing history in Britain and Ireland is not a single line, and it did not begin at one moment. But there are a handful of places where something genuinely shifted, and three of them are worth knowing properly rather than in the compressed version that gets repeated in guidebook introductions.
Napes Needle, June 1886
Napes Needle is a detached rock tower on the Great Napes, on the southern flank of Great Gable in the Lake District, above Wasdale. It is not large. It is not the hardest thing on the crag. It matters because of what it was not for.
Walter Parry Haskett Smith, a young Oxford graduate and barrister, climbed it alone in June 1886, without rope, spikes or ladders. Before that, rock work in Britain was largely understood as training or preparation for Alpine mountaineering. The Needle went nowhere, led to nothing and served no larger expedition. Climbing it was the entire point. That is why the ascent is so widely described as the moment rock climbing in England became a sport in its own right, and why the Needle became an object of pilgrimage almost immediately.
Some caution is warranted about the claim. It is a symbolic date rather than a strict first, and people had certainly scrambled and climbed on British rock before. The convention has held because it captures a change in intent rather than a change in technique.
The Date Nobody Can Pin Down
Here is a detail usually smoothed over. Haskett Smith himself only ever said the ascent was made about the end of June 1886. Later writers deduced 27 June. Other published accounts give 29 June, and some give 2 or 3 July. Nobody can settle it, because the climber did not record it precisely at the time and had no reason to think anyone would care.
We think that is a better story than a fake certainty, and it is a useful reminder about early climbing history generally: the records were made by participants who were not documenting a sport, because there was not yet a sport to document.
The Inaccessible Pinnacle, 18 August 1880
Six years earlier and considerably further north, two Lancashire brothers, Charles and Lawrence Pilkington, climbed the Inaccessible Pinnacle on Sgùrr Dearg in the Cuillin of Skye. The date is firm: 18 August 1880. They were guided to the foot of the climb from Sligachan by way of Coruisk and the Bealach Coire na Banachdich by a local man, John Mackenzie. They went up the east ridge, throwing down a great deal of loose rock as they went.
The Pinnacle is a fin of rock about 50 metres along its longest edge, and its top stands at 985.8 metres. Unusually for the Cuillin it is basalt rather than gabbro, which means it is noticeably slippery when wet, and the Cuillin is frequently wet.
The Munro That Requires a Rope
Sgùrr Dearg is the only Munro whose true summit cannot be reached without rock climbing, which makes the In Pinn the single hardest obstacle facing anyone attempting all of them. The usual line is the long east ridge, two roped pitches of about 30 metres, graded Moderate, which is the lowest grade in current British use. The holds are good. The exposure is extraordinary, and an early climber's description of a knife-edged ridge with an overhanging and infinite drop on one side and a longer, steeper drop on the other has never really been improved on. Descent is normally by abseil from a fixed anchor at the west end.
There is a nice administrative oddity attached to it. In the first edition of Munro's Tables in 1891, the 978-metre top just below the Pinnacle was listed as the Munro and the higher Pinnacle as a subsidiary top. That was reversed at the first revision in 1921, for reasons that are not clearly recorded. Sir Hugh Munro himself never climbed it.
Dalkey Quarry and the Irish Mountaineering Club
Irish climbing has a later and more institutional starting point, and a specific address: a disused granite quarry on Dalkey Hill in south County Dublin.
The first recorded climbs at Dalkey Quarry were made in 1942 by members of the newly formed Irish Mountaineering Club, founded that year by Bill Perrott and a group of climbers based within easy reach of the quarry. That first incarnation, now known as the Old IMC, disbanded in 1944. The club was revived on a more formal footing in 1948 by Perrott, Joss Lynam and others, with the deliberate intention of becoming a national body with branches in the major cities. Its first president was the naturalist Robert Lloyd Praeger.
From Dalkey the same people pushed out to the Scalp, Bray Head and Ireland's Eye, and those routes are the foundation of climbing development in Ireland. The quarry now holds over 350 graded routes, including some of the hardest single-pitch climbing in the country, and the club has run an annual beginners' rock course there and at Glendalough since 1966. It remains, for a large proportion of Irish climbers, where they first tied in.
What the Three Have in Common
Not much, geologically or technically. What links them is that each marks the point where climbing in its region stopped being a means to something else. Haskett Smith climbed a tower that went nowhere. The Pilkingtons climbed a fin of basalt because it was the one Cuillin summit that resisted walking. The IMC's founders picked a worked-out quarry on the edge of a city because it was close enough to use every week.
All three, and the regions around them, are covered route by route and region by region in Mountain Climbing Ireland, Mountain Climbing Scotland and Mountain Climbing UK, with honest grading, access and parking detail, and a clear line drawn between where a route is still a walk and where it becomes a climb.