Exhibition explores mountaineering's origins

Mountain climbing's Cumbrian origins are being explored in a new exhibition.

The show at the Beacon Museum in Whitehaven opened on Saturday and details the sport's 200-year history in England and Wales.

It highlights the nation's first known mountain climb for recreational purposes which took place on Pillar Rock in the Lake District in 1826, according to the display's curator Ian Smith.

He said he wanted visitors to leave the exhibition knowing more about the sport, and to learn climbers were not "all mad".

Smith said research from the past few years had revealed that farmer John Atkinson, from Ennerdale, was the most likely person to have first climbed a mountain in England for fun.

He said the local newspaper the Cumberland Paquet had written about Atkinson in a short article which said he had "succeeded in attaining the summit of the rock called Pillarstone".

The mountain is the eighth highest summit in the Lake District.

Smith said no future references to Atkinson had been found in newspapers and the sport eventually became more widespread when wealthy Victorian gentlemen started holidaying to the mountains.

"People just started walking up the mountains then started thinking 'oh I could climb up that cliff as well'," he said.

He also said the exhibition, by the Mountain Heritage Trust, "details the little we know about Atkinson and the major safety innovations that have since come about in the sport".

"In the 19th Century climbing was pretty dangerous and it was only done by people who had that level of commitment and skill," Smith said.

"Now we have better ropes, safety harnesses and lots of different things… climbing is no longer the preserve of the very elite."

Smith said he hoped that non-climbers who visited the exhibition took away a better sense of why the sport was so popular.

"It's physical, it's exercise, you're in the great outdoors - it's great companionship," he said.

The show runs until 12 February.

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