“PERHAPS YOU COULD regard gill climbing as harking back to the old days before guidebooks, when people did their own exploring in out-of-the-way places. Entering a gill you have never seen at close quarters is deliciously uncertain.” So said Harry Griffin – a pioneer of gill scrambling in the mid 20th Century.
In an age of manicured paths, creeping commercialisation and manufactured adventure, gill scrambling offers a return to Victorian exploring – a far cry from the Lake District’s more celebrated attractions. Gills also harbour the relics of our original forest vegetation, fragments that show what the original landscape would have been before humans made their mark on the lakes in such a dramatic way. Gill scrambling can invoke a primaeval past.
HIDDEN TREASURES
The term ‘gill’ is Scandinavian in origin and is generally associated with the Lake District and especially with the Borrowdale Volcanics series, where streams exploit its weaknesses. A gill can be a relatively open small stream but usually refers to one with very steep sides and a rocky bed. The alternative spelling of ‘ghyll’ was coined by the Victorians and is poetic in origin, and its use correlated with the Victorians’ increasing interest in and
