know how it functions.’
* The mountains in Britain are Ben Hope and Creag an Leth-Choin in Scotland, Carnedd Llewelyn in Snowdonia, Pen y Fan in the Brecon Beacons, Kinder Scout in Derbyshire, the Old Man of Coniston, Brown Willy on Bodmin Moor, Holdstone Down on Exmoor and Yes Tor on Dartmoor. Notable mountains abroad include Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, Mount Kosciuszko in Australia, Mount Adams in the eastern United States and Madrigerfluh in Switzerland. These kept King busy – ‘charging’ the mountains took him three years in a journey he dubbed ‘Operation Starlight’.
* Snowdonia is thick with Arthurian connotations, although these are mostly concentrated on Snowdon itself.
* Plantlife, a charity for wild flora in Britain, pulls no technical punches in its description of Cadair’s botanical interest: ‘[Cadair Idris] is noted for vascular, habitat and bryophyte interest. Euphrasia hotspot. Calcareous rocky slopes with chasmophytic vegetation; Oligotrophic to mesotrophic standing waters with vegetation of the Littorelletea uniflorae and/or of the Isoëto-Nanojuncetea; Siliceous rocky slopes with chasmophytic vegetation; Siliceous scree of the montane to snow levels (Androsacetalia alpinae and Galeopsietalia ladani).’ I couldn’t have put it better.
* Hemans also has the distinction of coining the term ‘stately home’ in the first line of her 1827 poem ‘The Homes of England’. The first line reads: ‘The stately Homes of England,/How beautiful they stand!’
At around 3 p.m. on Saturday 2 April 1960, three sixteen-year-old army cadets vanished on the slopes of Snowdon. They were part of a group of five who had left Pen-y-Pass earlier that afternoon for the summit of Wales’ highest peak during their much-anticipated ten-day adventure-training holiday.
The weather was a mix of rain and low cloud – reasonably gruesome by sea-level standards, but nothing odd for this part of North Wales. Snowdon’s high elevation and proximity to the coast meant waiting for perfect conditions hereabouts was hardly the done thing, and certainly wasn’t character building – at the time a prerequisite for most forms of youthful outdoor endeavour. Besides, these boys had been assured that the route they were taking up the 1,085-metre peak wasn’t anything worth fretting over; according to their instructor, the ridge that would be the outing’s highlight ‘had been walked by women in high heels’.
Initially, the headlines that began to creep into the national press were coyly optimistic. The Daily Mail began its story of Monday 4 April with the comforting image that the three boys had ‘settled down to spend their second night in mist and drizzle’, clearly confident that nothing more malign than a twisted ankle or disorientation could be preventing the boys from reappearing, weary but chipper, when the mist finally cleared.
But at 8.30 a.m. on Monday 4th, hope was abandoned. Two members of a rescue team came across three bodies with severe head injuries lying amongst rocks at the base of a 100-metre drop, in an area known as Square Gully. The boys – John Brenchley, John Itches and Tony Evans – were roped together. The rescuers’ report delicately implied that their injuries were such that death would have been instantaneous. It had taken a team of 100 nearly two days to find them.
Piecing together what had happened wasn’t difficult. The three boys, separated from their instructor in rain and sudden Snowdonia mist, had taken a wrong turn on the ridge. Becoming lost in a catacomb of tall rocks and terrain that coaxed them towards dangerous ground, amidst tiredness and fear one had stumbled and fallen; the others, tied together, had been pulled down with him. According to one seasoned rescuer, what befell the boys that day was ‘sheer bad luck’.
Even in 1960 it wasn’t uncommon for people to lose their lives climbing British mountains. But the story of the three teenaged boys lost on Snowdon touched something sensitive in the national consciousness – and with the final, tragic outcome, something snapped.
Over the next few days, the stern faces of Search and Rescue personnel, teachers, police officers and mountaineers filled the pages of the national press, all proposing competing theories as to how this tragedy could possibly have occurred – not just on a mountain, but on a mountain damningly described as ‘safe’. The papers had a thorough chew of the case, announcing the tragedy with predictably hysterical headlines such as ‘The Ridge of Death Row’ (Daily Mail) and ‘Peril on a Peak’ (Daily Mirror). Both stories featured grim photographs from the mountainside – grubby and speckled in the way only 1960s news pictures can be – of rescuers manhandling stretchers down sharp rock, and each came loaded with blame cross-haired in various directions: chiefly towards mist, bad luck and, inevitably, the boys’ instructor, an experienced and ‘highly competent’ 28-year-old mountaineer named Peter Sutcliffe.
Many of Sutcliffe’s critics claimed that the young instructor’s charge of five boys was far too much for him alone to herd safely to Snowdon’s summit, and that the deteriorating weather should have prompted him to turn the group back. Others focused on details, highlighting the inherent flaws in the ‘roping-together’ technique the boys were using – an arrangement common in the Alps that relies on the principle that if one person takes a tumble, the others are required to quickly and deftly fling the slack over a handy spike of rock to arrest the fall (the problem here being, of course, that if no spike immediately presents itself the rest of the party is yanked towards whatever doom awaits). But most extraordinary in all of this was the disagreement amongst practically everybody as to exactly how serious the route the group took up Snowdon – that ‘Ridge of Death Row’ so subtly christened by the Daily Mail – really was.
Surely this was straightforward: it was either a route from which you could easily fall to your death or it wasn’t. Even in the tragedy’s aftermath, Sutcliffe stuck to his assertion that the ridge was ‘not a climb, but a walk’, along with his aforementioned reference to untroubled women in high heels. Reportedly, the reason the boys were using a rope was for training purposes, not for any concerns over safety.
An inquest was held in a tiny stone chapel in Llanberis, during which Arthur Bell, the guardian of John Brenchley, repeatedly pilloried Sutcliffe on this seemingly very complicated point. One exchange began with Bell levelling: ‘Am I right that in places this ridge is just a narrow pathway with a drop on either side?’ Sutcliffe responded that yes, this was correct. Bell then countered: ‘Yet you say you don’t think this is dangerous?’ Sutcliffe simply replied that no, he didn’t. Then a senior member of mountain rescue gave Sutcliffe’s defence some much-needed solidity. When asked if he considered the route dangerous for inexperienced people, he responded with: ‘No, sir – I’ve seen young children up there.’
A verdict of ‘misadventure’ followed, with coroner E. Lloyd-Jones citing mist as the principal cause. But Bell remained adamant that the route itself – and the decision to tackle it – was to blame. In a statement he said: ‘I have been told that the ledge from which they fell is only two foot wide. I think this walk was dangerous, and I don’t think the boys should have faced such risks.’
Lloyd-Jones delivered a statement in acknowledgement, worth noting for a simplicity that verges on the profound: ‘Of course there is danger. It is one of the objects of the course.’
Over 50 years later, people continue
