Wednesday Weekly Meet
On Wednesday night those in the Swansea area are meeting at Dynamic Rock from 6:30pm, whilst those around Cardiff will mainly be at Boulders from around 6pm with a stop for refreshments in the café at some point.

Membership Subscription Renewal
Membership subscriptions are currently due, and all members have been contacted recently by the membership secretaries. This year, for the first time you are now able to set up Direct Debit for your membership subscription.

Upcoming Meets
There are currently no meets planned within the next month, however a number of members have expressed interest in heading out on the weekends in order to walk the mountains. Anyone may contribute a meet to the list.

Climbing at Llangattock in the 1960s.
The following letter was recently received by email from Mark Lambert:

Dear SWMC,

Sometime round about 1963, the King’s School Worcester purchased a de-consecrated Chapel north of Llanbedr to use as an outdoor pursuits centre. I was a schoolboy at King’s (1960 -1967) and already a keen climber, so was really anxious to help get such a well-located facility up and running. Early visits to the chapel seemed, in my memory anyway, to have been spent cleaning and whitewashing its crumbling plaster, sealing window frames and hacking away at the surrounding forest of nettles which threatened to hide it from human view.
My climbing partner Malcolm Brook and I had gazed longingly and often at the long scarp above Llangattock as the school’s converted Bedford ambulance bounced down into Crickhowell – we couldn’t wait to get up there and find out if it was as good as it looked.

Our chance came at the end of one Easter term. I cannot now be sure whether it was 1965 or 1966. (All my notes, route descriptions and crag photos were lost sometime in the 80s when my parents moved house. Malcolm’s photos all went in the bin when he moved with his family out to Kathmandu and had to get all their possessions into a single container shipment! I had sent them all off for inclusion in the ‘Brecon Beacons National Park Sheet no. 22 Interim Guide to Rock Climbing’, fortunately.) We ‘thumbed’ lifts down from Worcester at the end of term and camped somewhere in the middle of the cirque, above Coed Pen-Twyn. We started our exploration at Craig y Castell.
Although we had noticed the bolts above the overhang at the right-hand end of Pant y Rhiw, there didn’t seem to be any sign of previous climbers at Craig y Castell. The cracks were packed with vegetation, there was a fair amount of loose rock and, of course, there were no belay stakes. After our first day of precarious belaying, tied hopefully to small trees or distant boulders, we bummed a metal bar from a garage in Crickhowell, hammered it in at the top of the crag with whatever rock was nearby and moved it from place to place as we needed it. Nearly all our climbs were done ground-up without inspection, but I do remember abseiling down one or two to lever out loose blocks and to clear vegetation. Sometimes I led, sometimes Malcolm.
I can’t pretend to remember the actual routes, but I do remember some of the names we gave them. Stromboli (I’d recently done Stromboli at Tremadoc – I don’t think that this climb bore any resemblance to it, but I liked the name and was feeling rather grand at getting to give names to new routes), Rebecca, Daedalus (who was Ariadne’s correspondent in the ‘New Scientist’), Catacomb, Rowan Route, Stupid Sapling and, though I’m not so sure about these, the Twins and Orang-Utan. There was also a route which we named, absurdly delighted at our adolescent wit, The Prickly Pair, because the briar, holly or gorse round which Malcolm had had to lead had threatened his nether parts. I was particularly proud of my lead of the overhanging flake of ‘The Hobbit’ HVS, but I can’t recall exactly where it was and it seems to have sunk into oblivion. In all we climbed and recorded about twenty ‘new’ routes.
We enjoyed a few pints in the Horseshoes with some hard drinking cavers from, I think, the Chelsea Caving Club (?) who we’d encountered on their way to ‘Aggi Aggi’, as they called it. They’d never seen or heard of anyone climbing – “a daft and dangerous sport, anyway” – and opined that there was no local climbing club. The weather deteriorated after three or four days, so we jogged off to fester in the Pubs in Crickhowell or Abergavenny, where again, no-one had heard of any local climbers.

I was inordinately proud of my first publication – a letter in ‘Climber and Rambler’, in which I extolled the wonders of Llangattock, which we fondly imagined we had ‘discovered’. In my letter, I asked if anyone knew of any established routes there and mentioned that “there wasn’t any evidence of a local climbing club”. My letter provoked two responses, the first from R J ‘Chris’ Barber, instructor at Herefordshire Education Committee’s outdoor centre at Longtown, over Llanthony way. He was collecting details of routes for an interim Guidebook; we sent him the details of all of ours. Soon there arrived several copies of said ‘Guide’, cyclostyled on blue foolscap. Malcolm and I were surprised that most of the established routes were at the other end of the scarp, mainly on Pant y Rhiw. I recall that ALL the routes on Craig y Castell were ours. (Only a few of the names I recognize appeared in the 1983 SWMC Guide, so I assume that many of ours had been done before and already had been named.)
The second response was from the SWMC, in the form of a reply published in the next month’s ‘Climber and Rambler” from, if I remember aright, Pete Leyshon. He was, perhaps understandably, a little peeved at my suggestion that there was no ‘local’ club and he extolled the achievements of the SWMC and promised that a Guidebook would soon be forthcoming.
Armed with Chris Barber’s interim Guide, I persuaded the school to include “Rock-climbing at Llangattock” among the Combined Cadet Force activities that summer – this time some ten or twelve budding climbers visited Chwar Pant y Rhiw and we worked our way through the recorded routes, noting a number of seemingly unclimbed lines.

Next holidays (1967) Malcolm Brook and I were back, this time at Pant y Rhiw. Puraka was led by Malcolm (the word is Sanscrit for ‘deep breath’ – he was into Yoga in a big way then), as was Belshazzar’s Dream (feet of clay…head of gold? A bit fanciful, I know, but we were only teenagers….) Ramblin Sid reflected our love of ‘Round the Horne’, and I’m fairly sure that Raven Route, Creaking Flakes and Hideaway were ours.
I led a diagonally ascending route up one of the flowstone walls at the right hand end of Pant y Rhiw (Overflow, HVS) which was poorly protected by No 1 (5/8 circ.) nylon threads behind hollow encrustations. I was dithering on this climb when Colin Mortlock hove into view with a group of enthusiasts in tow. He clearly knew the crag well, later pointing out some routes not in Barber’s Guide, which Malc and I proceeded to repeat, removing an unnecessary channel peg from one of them.
We also went round to the right, beneath the large overhang and I spent many an insecure hour trying to peg my way up to join the alloy bolt hangers we had spotted the year before. (They were still there in 2012!) My only previous experience of pegging was a failed attempt at what is now ‘Kink’ at Stoney and I soon convinced myself that I was loosening the entire overhang, so I retreated in disorder. I was always a bit of a drama queen…but I did remove all the pegs (we’d paid for them, dammit !)
This holiday came to a premature and unhappy end when Malcolm took a long tumble from an attempt on another new line on the cliff left of Pant y Rhiw (Darren or the Eastern Edge?), and ‘sprained’ his ankle. He couldn’t climb any more; a local who had been walking his dog gave him a lift to the station at Abergavenny and the next day I packed both rucksacs and hitchhiked back to my home in Derbyshire. There I discovered that Malcolm had actually broken off the medial malleolus of his ankle and had to have an operation to screw it back on.
We did send off the descriptions of all the routes we’d done that week to Chris Barber. Some have survived, some haven’t….

We never climbed at Llangattock again.
I left The King’s School to try to improve my abysmal A level results elsewhere, Malcolm Brook left to study Medicine at Manchester.
In late 2012 I enjoyed a leisurely week, drinking red wine mostly, on the Mon and Brecon canal and one clear morning I jogged up the Beaufort road to Craig y Castell and wandered along the scarp, remembering and reliving the excitement of climbing new routes. I still climb, mostly HVS and an occasional E, but no climbing has ever given me such pleasure as those thrilling teenage days exploring Llangattock.

A long time ago.

But like yesterday.

Best wishes,

Mark Lambert

SWMC Archives
The above letter from Mark Lambert has prompted the desire to form an archive of the history of SWMC and climbing in South Wales, which could be digitised and deposited in a local county archive. If you have content you are willing to contribute, then get in contact with [email protected].

Newsletter Contrinutions
This is your club, so if you have any info, stories, trip reports or photos to include in the weekly newsletter then send them directly to [email protected], preferably no later than 5pm on Monday.