Climbing in Holyrood Park has a long history, but there are real risks as well as rewards

Of all the photos I’ve ever taken of snow-covered hillsides (and I’ve taken a few in my time, mostly of dubious quality), the one I return to most often was snapped not in the Alps or the Rockies but in the middle of Edinburgh, looking south-east from the top of Calton Hill towards Salisbury Crags. The picture was taken on 7 December 2010, just before sunrise, towards the end of a rare, week-long cold snap that had transformed the crags and nearby Arthur’s Seat into an unlikely paradise for skiers and snowboarders. In the foreground you can see a few Old Town chimney pots and, just behind them, the tower blocks of Dumbiedykes; in the background, looming over the cityscape, are the crags, plastered in snow and – if you look very carefully – marked with the tell-tale evidence of multiple ski and snowboard descents.

Why does this image still get so much airtime on my phone, nearly a decade after it was taken? Because sometimes the only way to convince people that there’s a whole world of difference between snowboarding down Salisbury Crags and, say, skiing around Hampstead Heath, is to get out a picture and show them. The crags may not be very high, and they may only be a couple of stones’ throws from the Royal Mile, but what they lack in size and remoteness they more than make up for in terms of steepness and rugged charm, and, along with Arthur’s Seat, they form a perfect, pocket-sized mountain range right in the heart of the city.

Most of the time the crags serve as a photogenic backdrop for tourist photos and – thanks to the Radical Road – a spectacular place to go for a walk, but every once in a while we get a reminder that they also provide an arena for more serious mountaineering activities.

On 29 June this year, to mark Armed Services Day, Hans Donner, 39, and Josh Beinn, 29, became the first people ever to base jump from the top of the crags. With only a 32 metre drop between the point at which they left the top of the crags and the point at which they knew they would need their parachutes to have deployed, the two ex-servicemen realised that what they were doing was “close to the limit.” However, they managed to avoid rocks, gorse bushes and dogwalkers on their way down to Queen’s Drive and described the experience of being the first to base jump off the crags as “exhilarating.”

Then, on 14 July, only a couple of weeks after Donner and Beinn’s historic jump, tragedy struck on a different part of the crags when a 22-year-old climber, still unnamed at time of going to press, fell between 10 and 15 metres after a camming device failed to hold his weight. Paramedics tried to save him but the man – who had been climbing with a friend – died at the scene.

These might seem like two random, isolated incidents, but in fact they are both part of a continuum – a long and significant history of mountaineering on the crags.

After joining the Scottish Mountaineering Club in 1896, the great Harold Raeburn – who would later take part in the 1921 British Mount Everest reconnaissance expedition – spent several years with William Inglis Clark recording new routes here, and in the middle of the last century the crags became the haunt of the legendary Jimmy Marshall, who, along with Robin Smith, rocked the climbing world in 1960 with a series of thengroundbreaking first ascents on Ben Nevis.

More recently, Scottish ski racer Finlay Mickel became (probably) the first person ever to launch an air off the Radical Road, while skiing the crags during the aforementioned spell of Arctic weather in December 2010. A Youtube clip of his ride promptly went viral, and is another useful artefact to show to anyone from out of town who imagines Edinburgh’s inner city mountain range to be some sort of gentlysloping meadow.

These are just some of the more notable moments in the sporting history of the crags, but the fact is this is a year-round climbing venue. The logbook for Salisbury Crags on the UK Climbing website shows no fewer than 124 known routes, from Cat Nick Arete and Black Chimney Buttress to The Bulge and Pinnacle Corner. The Historic Scotland Ranger Service have even produced a guide to climbing in Holyrood Park, showing areas where you can and cannot climb. One day, perhaps, somebody will write a proper mountaineering history of this remarkable downtown mountainscape. In the meantime, there will continue to be triumphs, tragedies, and life-affirming moments aplenty. n

The logbook for Salisbury Crags on the UK Climbing website shows no fewer than 124 known routes