Evans awards Skew Gill Grade 1, zero stars. I soloed it yesterday. I was alone since the situation regarding scrambling company has gone completely critical and I chose Skew Gill since I wanted an interesting route onto Great End to retrieve my missing pictures of Cust’s gully (ibidem).

Actually I think Mr Evans is unkind in this instance. For a start Skew Gill gets you well away from the madding crowds (and yesterday they were numbered by the hundred – I kid you not) as nobody else in their right mind is going to go there.

However it’s also big enough to have its own micro climate and is full of flowers. Huge towers and pinnacles hint of secret, inaccessible side valleys and it’s easy to imagine pterodactyls swooping down to snatch the innocent scrambler from his tenuous stance. Higher up, where the Gill starts to narrow down a bit, the stance does indeed get a bit tenuous.

It’s usually possible to scramble up the sides of the beck but I didn’t fancy this much on this occasion. It all looked a bit loose and you could fall quite a long way. So it seemed better to climb through the water and brave the slime – which actually wasn’t too bad for once. Fortunately there wasn’t much water about yesterday but a couple of sections required close concentration and a certain determination.

The finale finds you breaking left up a steep cleft over a large chockstone. I found my heartbeat was distinctly accelerated at this point, so while I think I’d go with Mr Evans Grade 1 (under low-water conditions, at least) I would certainly want to award a star or two. After a bit of rain, I imagine things could get quite exciting and you might want to take a wet-suit – or find a dryer way of killing yourself.

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