Year of publication 1960 - Fell and Rock Climbing Club

Peter Grindley 27the line in a very slight groove; this combination of fingerholdswith a slight improvement in foot-grip and an occasionaltoehold is a feature of many of the best slab pitches. It makesthe difference between a slab which will go and one which willnot, and in the more pronounced form sometimes providesmeans to force otherwise intractable walls. A less reputablemethod of circumventing difficulties is by grass ledge traverses.Mourne is no more heavily vegetated than otherareas, but the small ledges, when they occur, seem to do so incompletely impossible places. Recently, while climbing withthe writer, a high official of the Belfast Section of the IrishMountaineering Club followed a grass ledge down and thusupgraded the route by two degrees; but usually the ledgesare quite secure in spite of there being no supporting rockledge beneath. On most faces they are altogether absent,but a notable exception is Pigeon Rock Mountain where themain face overlooking the Spelga Pass is a system of steep rockwalls with grass and heather ledges in profusion between. Itreasure memories of a harassed climbing companion scalingthe upper face with the speed and dexterity of a baboon,unsympathetic friends having fired the face beneath him atthe suggestion that he was stuck.Mourne climbing is fairly recent. There was an initialphase of activity in the late thirties and about a dozen routesare recorded from this period. From the beginning of thewar until 1947 little or nothing was done; then a new schoolarose and by the early fifties was in full cry. The leadingspirits were Phil Gribbon and Maurice McMurray with othermembers of the Belfast Section of the I.M.C. and the thennewly-formed Queen's University of Belfast MountaineeringClub. The Irish Mountaineering Club cottage, the BloatHouse, was instituted and soon became the centre of a cultureand civilization unknown since the days of Tara of the Kings;routes multiplied and gradings steadily advanced. The tigersof Glendalough and Dalkey Quarries occasionally raidednorth over the border leaving new climbs strewn in their wake,and from the portals of the Bloat House the fumes ofGuinness and Phil Gribbon's herbal smoking mixtureascended each week-end like a grateful incense to the gods ofthe hills. Then in 1955 the scourge of Ireland, the tendencyto emigrate, began to deplete the Mourne climbing society.