 |
ROCK CLIMBING & BOULDERING
Extract from 'Who's Who in British Climbing'
The Barley Brothers
Robin Barley (1945 -)
Tony Barley (1948 -)
Brothers in Arms
As Yorkshire as Yorkshire Terriers raised on Yorkshire Pudding, the Barley brothers hailed from Nidderdale but were actually quite posh by the normal standards of '50s and '60s British cragrats. The pair began climbing at Brimham Rocks in traditional post-war style with no rope, while they were boarding school boys. Nevertheless they still managed to get up VSs in their gym pumps. The brothers' dad, who owned a spinning mill, caught wind of what they were up to but instead of trying to stop it, simply spun them a rope in t'mill. Armed with this homespun hemp talisman they began new -routeing at the esoteric gritstone backwater of Guisecliff. By the early 1960s. with the brothers at university, they started 'burning up all the hard routes' in the area and established difficult new ones like North Buttress Direct (HVS 5a) at Guisecliff and Beatnik (E3 5c) at Brimham, a route regarded for many years a sthe hardest on the crag despite having been soloed by Robin after he had failed to top-rope it. As a result, they became World Famous in Yorkshire.
By the mid '60s the Barley's partnership rivalled those other contemporary greats Pete Crew and Baz Ingle, with routes like Carnage (E2 5b) at Malham ('climbed on a wet day with only two points of protection'), The Creation (E2 5c) at Guisecliff, Black Wall Eliminate (E2 5c) at Almscliff and Trauma Traverse at Kilnsey (the latter was significant for being one of the first free-climbs established on the crag in an aid-dominated era).
The brothers occasionally ventured out of their Yorkshire playground to the Peak, Wales, the Lakes and Scotland, where they established routes like Rubberneck (HVS 5b) at the Roaches and the impressive Culloden (E2 5c) on Creag an Dubh Loch. Nevertheless, in the immortal words of arch-Yorkshireman Dennis Gray: 'It was in West Yorkshire they remained supreme.' At Malham they produced routes like Carnage Left Hand, and The Blinds Finish, Crossbones and the Right Hand Girdle; at Gordale Yark and Yark Left Hand; Kilnsey brought forth further pioneering free climbs such as Warlord and Brainstorm.
After graduating as an engineer in 1967 Tony left for South Africa. Yorkshire climbing was never the same again. But neither was South African climbing, for the following year Robin graduated as a medic and followed his brother out there. The late '602 saw them pioneering over 50 new routes in the Transvaal. Robin later moved to Cape Town and began climbing new lines on Table Mountain. Together with his bro they produced routes like Armageddon on the Krantzberg cliffs, regarded as the hardest route in the Transvaal for over a decade, and Apollo 8, a 1000ft route that was widely admired as one of the best climbs in the country at the time. Shortly afterwards, however, the partnership was temporarily ended after a ledge collapsed, pitching Tony 200ft and fracturing his skull. Amazingly he recovered and by the early '70s was back climbing in the UK. After overcoming a viral infection which hampered his top-end climbing, by 1974 he was putting up routes like the bold Mastermind (E4 5c)at his old stomping ground of Guisecliff. He's still at it, cranking out 6a boulder problems and producing mini-guides like Wild Bouldering in Yorkshire. Robin, meanwhile, initially moved to Sweden where he energetically galvanised the local climbing scene, popularising cliffs at Gothenburg and the granite Halsingborg Peninsula. Even more innovatively, having brought new-fangled Terrordactyls from Britain, Robin began climbing the local frozen waterfalls in the winter, thus pump-priming the Swedish ice-climbing scene. Now resident in Canada, he occasionally returns to the ancestral crags to indulge in a session of atavistic cragging with his brother.
|
