Climbing, Robert Graves' 'Welsh Incident', And...

Canadian Rockies. Photo by Bernard Spragg (public domain) 


I have been reading the book Echoes: One Climber's Hard Road to Freedom by Nick Bullock. He is a climber from Staffordshire whose blog is also very much worth reading. Nick Bullock first came to my attention when I read an article in the Guardian about a bear attack in the Canadian Rockies involving him and another climber. Both climbers survived and Bullock wrote a gripping account on his blog.

I followed Bullock on Twitter and when, slightly to my surprise, he followed me back, I discovered that he was also a poetry enthusiast. We had an exchange one day when he tweeted that he had just climbed a route called The Wrecking Light and I asked if it was named after the book by Robin Robertson. He said yes, it was his current poetry reading and the name suited the route. I also thought it a wonderful name for a line on a mountain.

Climbing and poetry often seem to intersect, particularly in the Midlands and north - the British regions which have produced a lot of climbers. Helen Mort, from Sheffield and Derbyshire, recently released a good collection called No Map Could Show Them, many of whose poems are about women in climbing and mountaineering. When I went to one of her readings, she described how writing a poem could be like climbing a route, or vice versa.

Early on in the book Echoes, I was led off on a Sebaldean (I wish) train of thought which, I suppose, was also something like writing a poem or climbing a route. Bullock was describing how at one point in his life he had lived near the Welsh towns of Porthmadog and Criccieth, both of which I visited when I travelled around Snowdonia in 2002. I'm not sure what took me to Criccieth - all I remember is that I had to go one or two stops farther on the train than I otherwise would have, and that all I really did was look at the castle ruins, and then leave. But anyway, while reading the book, I was suddenly reminded not only of my brief visit, but also of the poem 'Welsh Incident' by Robert Graves, which I find both funny and slightly sinister.

By the way, while this blog post was still in draft form, my temporary title for it was 'Nick Bullock/Welsh Incident/weirdness'. That should tell you something about how my mind works, in case this post didn't already illustrate it.