Released alongside the exhibition Rock Poets – a concertina booklet featuring poetic arrangements of rock climb names

Below is a digital representation of the booklet, which you can also download as a PDF

Side One | Featuring a detail of the painting The Cobbler

Side Two | Featuring a detail of the painting Buachaille

Overview

Rock Poets celebrates the poetic, subversive & gallus names given to Scottish rock climbs over the past 100 years

This exhibition brings together a collection of new works, centring on a series of paintings in mixed media that celebrate the poetic, subversive and gallus names that have been given to Scottish rock climbs over the past 100 years.

Climbers claim naming-rights when they are the first person to successfully conquer a route, and the Scottish landscape is littered with crags that not many people realise have amusing names attached to them like Fingerwrecker and Special Brew.

I am not a rock climber, but a year ago I came across a handwritten diary by David Hastie about a weekend he spent climbing in Wester Ross in 1951. It is a record of his wonder at seeing the other-worldly landscape of Assynt for the first time as a young man of nineteen. I immediately wanted to try to capture the dramatic landscape that had so affected him, and has affected me too on many visits. I wanted to incorporate some of the words used by climbers to describe it, including his.

During my research into routes mentioned in the diary, I began to see the names of rock climbs as a body of work, and noticed patterns, sequences and humour in the titles. There were themes of love of landscape, joy, rivalry, fear, class struggle, betrayal and damnation; some were just pure whimsy.

This was the beginning of a series of mountain paintings, which were completed over the course of 2019.

Early Days

In the 1800s and early 1900s climbers gave mainly descriptive names like Right-angled Corner and A Buttress or B Buttress. They were simply telling other climbers how to find places. Some called routes after themselves.

Classical names reflected the educated, middle-class backgrounds of most early climbers. Biblical names and names associated with plants found near climbs were also popular.

Humour only occasionally appeared. Gardyloo Gully on Ben Nevis lies directly below a spot on the summit where an Observatory once stood. For years, people in the Observatory chucked their rubbish over the edge of the mountain into this gully. First ascenders had to clear a great deal away to get to the top.

Working class men, and occasionally women, started climbing in the 1930s and at first followed the naming traditions set by previous generations. A theme established by an early major route up a buttress or pinnacle would become the basis for naming adjacent routes, and in this way families of related names would be built up.

In the 1940s humorous titles began to appear. For example, Kipling’s Groove in Langdale in the Lake District was named because it was ‘rudy’ard’.

1960 Onwards

In the 1960s route names became more edgy, some slightly risqué. They got past censors perhaps because guide-book moderators were trying to be less stuffy and more in tune with the times.

A strict moderation process has prevented overtly rude or offensive names from making it into official guidebooks. Occasionally, an attempt to sneak a name with a double meaning past moderators and into the official record book succeeded and had to be edited out of the next edition.

Banter, teasing and point-scoring between competing climbers became a feature. Rival climbers named one ascent McLean’s Folly because the hugely respected and brilliant McLean had uncharacteristically fallen off and been unable to claim it as his own.

In line with the softening of class distinctions, humour began to poke fun at authority. Climbers exploring a limestone block in a wood near Rosyth on land belonging to Lord Elgin (descendant of the Elgin Marbles acquisitor), met a great deal of resistance to trespassing. At one point climbing surfaces were painted with grease. The climbers persisted and in mild revenge, one of them named a route Elgin’s Crack.

Good-natured nationalism crept in. Working class climbers Don Whillans and Joe Brown came up on a ‘raid’ from England and stole two classic routes from ‘the Jocks’ who had not been able to get up them. To underline the triumph, Whillans and Brown named one of the climbs Sassenach.

In similar vein, Scottish legend John Cunningham went down to Wales and called a climb Creagh Dhu Wall, using the name of the infamous Glasgow club to which he and many of the hardest Scottish climbers belonged. In the 1980s English climbers named extremely difficult Scottish climbs Culloden and Flodden. Scottish climbers replied with a climb called Bannockburn.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, puns reigned supreme at Carrickcorie Crags on the Mull of Galloway with names like Your Plaice or Mine and Rhythm of the Reign.

The naming of rock climbs continues. Contemporary naming borrows from all previous traditions and continues to be inventive and poetic.

Thanks to Willie Gorman for historical fact-checking