MOUNTAIN PORTRAIT
Jim Perrin recalls climbing basics learned on a bold headland within a ‘far from pretty’ industrialised landscape
HELSBY HILL’S sheer presence is out of all proportion to its lowly height of 141 metres above sea level. Mind you, sea level when you’re at the OS pillar, which is securely fastened to the bare rock of this hill summit, is just down there. Between you and it are the bunched tiers of one of Britain’s finest rock-climbing outcrops – a great bluff of exposed old red sandstone that glowers down on the traffic roaring along the M56 directly beneath. The chemical plants of Widnes and Runcorn and the petrochemical flares from Stanlow oil refinery by the mouth of the Manchester Ship Canal along the last stages of the River Mersey are very close at hand. On fine days you can see the Welsh hills rising along the horizon to the west. The Peak District is visible to the east, and even the Cumbrian fells far to the north, but the outlook is frenetically busy and far from pretty.
The drone of motorway traffic, the toxicity at times of the air when the wind drifts north-easterly across the buttresses, all conspire against any sense of this summit being idyllic. It’s not. It’s industrialised and spoilt, Liverpool’s magnificent waterfront and Warrington’s urban sprawl lurk on the horizons. You’re a mere 30 miles from Manchester, the dirty old town of my origin; nonetheless, there is something special about this bold headland within a ruined landscape. If you’re a climber, picking your way down worn slabs of the great Clashooks gully that cleaves the buttresses will have huge resonance for you. This was one of the meccas of our sport during one of its most pivotal periods of accelerated progress. In the 1930s it was arguably as significant as Stanage Edge was during the early years of the revolutionary Joe Brown and Don Whillans epoch.
Helsby Crag is a name to conjure with, a presence to approach with at least a frisson of awe and respect for what was accomplished here in one of the crucial phases of the sport’s development in the 1930s. You can drive up a track to the top of it from a minor road to the south and, on fine weekends, will probably find it like a busy picnic site. It meant a lot to me in my earliest years as a climber. It was here and not on the gritstone edges that I learnt the arcane and crucial art of the hand jam, which enables you to relax in the most outlandish situations on rock. Arthur Williams, my fellow member of Manchester’s Alpha Club, met me one evening after work and school at his mother’s house on Morley Avenue, Fallowfield, just round the corner from my grandparents, and on his 500cc Royal Enfield Bullet (made in Birmingham!) we headed for Helsby.
It was no more
