Incident in the Devil's Kitchen

A Cambridge man goes for a ramble around Cwm Idwal [1600 words, 8 mins

In the years since leaving Cambridge I'd been pretty tied up with my book on Kummer’s Quartic Surface. You really want to know? Well, it turns out to have sixteen corners, and sixteen connecting curves of the sort called conic sections. You can make a model using springy wire, it's all very beautiful and interesting.

But still, my new post at University College Liverpool is almost in Wales – one of the reasons I chose it. With Kummer safely parcelled off to the C.U.P., it was time to take advantage of this topographic congruence. I arranged to meet Thomas at the Penygwyrd Hotel for a week's rambling among the mountains.

Monday was wet. Having shaken off the torpor induced by the hotel's excellent breakfast, we settled on a short jaunt of ten or eleven hours over the Carnedd ranges. The combination of dense cloud, with a wind that threatened to snatch our map at any moment, rendered the rounded mountains almost as mysterious and intriguing as Kummer's Surface itself. After a morning and half an afternoon of damp grassland, I was thrilled suddenly to come upon the Craig yr Isfa, shreds of cloud tearing through its gaps and gullies. Down among those buttresses was a climb I'd heard about at Cambridge, the Amphitheatre Buttress, said to be the longest in Wales.

Thomas was less thrilled than I at the incursion of a chasm into our grassy wander. Possibly he was under the uncomfortable sensation implied by its Welsh name of the place, the ‘Crag of the Urge to Leap Over the Edge’.

Tuesday was again wet, but less so. We decided to pay a visit to the Glyders. After an abridged breakfast, we were soon striding vigorously up the Bwlch Tryfan. Glyder Fach rose ahead, black in the gullies and damp with the overnight rain. As usually in these cases, the angle was less steep than it appeared from below. The rock, moreover, was rough and well provided with holds. Soon the ridge narrowed, with drops on the left to where a damp but hopeful sheep looked for plantlife on the miserable slopes of scree.

Ahead of me, Thomas disappeared into a dip. “I say, Ronald: this bit doesn't go at all.”

I had heard otherwise from the other chaps: so I diplomatically kept silence. To be rewarded a moment later with: “Well … perhaps round to the left here.” The impressive gendarme confronting my companion was, disappointingly, circumvented by a groove on its eastern side. All too soon, the ridge levelled to a rocky walk, and deposited us on the boulders of the small Glyder's summit.

Noon saw us passing the Dog Lake, and tossing the crusts of the Gwyrd’s generous sandwiches into the misty depths of something called the Devil's Kitchen. At Thomas’s suggestion we also sent down some of the sheep droppings, with which our picnic spot was so amply supplied. These would serve for currants so that Satan could bake himself a bread-and-butter pudding, not unlike the one we anticipated ourselves at the end of the day.

Sandwiches devoured, remaining sheep-droppings left in situ, we descended to the north between black basalt crags. Wind ruffled the Idwal Lake into sky colour and crag colour. I looked back up the scooped cwm, crags flaring like the cusp of a huge open bowl. Across the exact axis of the cwm, dropped the perpendicular slit of the Devil's Kitchen.

It was still early in the afternoon. “I want to go up there,” I said.

“It's dangerous,” Thomas pointed out. “Or if it isn't dangerous, it's impossible.” But I was aware that several Cambridge men had been up there the year before. We agreed that Thomas should proceed to the hotel and forewarn them of our urgent requirement for bread-and-butter pudding. I would return upwards to investigate the lower part of the infernal cookery facility.

Devil’s Kitchen, Snowdonia

Thomas is a good fellow, but it was with a new sense of freedom that I headed back into the grey cwm. Alone, I could hear the wind in the wet grasses, and observe the patterns brought out by rainfall in the rocks under my foot. Within twenty minutes I was crossing broken ground where ferns and succulent-leaved plants frothed from the gaps of the black boulders. Below me, around the lake, I could see the pattern of moraine humps left by the glacier.

Then I was at the foot of the great gully, its layered walls rising on either side of a band of boulders. I followed the white stream-water up into the gap. Soon I turned a corner and found the gully blocked by a single huge boulder, with the stream running down over it.

There was a sort of wriggling chimney on the left, between the boulder and the gully wall. It looked reasonably easy. I soon came to realise that it wasn't quite so easy as it looked. However, by then I was already two thirds of the way up, with the angular boulders of the gully floor two or three man-lengths below me. I wriggled a bit more, and my boot-nails found a rock edge within a matting of moss. A moment later I stood on the boulder's top.

I was inside the Kitchen now, and it was magnificent. The black walls rose on either side, further darkened below each ledge with streaks of peaty slime, but gleaming where the water ran down between the small mats of plant life. Behind me, the narrow gap showed a corner of the lake, and a strip of David's Carnedd looked pale and distant like some gentler world. Ahead, the gully floor was a succession of small pools like the treads of a silver staircase.

I moved up to the cauldron's back wall. This I'd heard described as the ‘Great Pitch’. It was not quite so sizeable as the name had suggested. Ahead and on the right, it was indeed a black and slightly overhanging cave. On the left, however, a succession of cracks led up to a traverse line across the back of the cul-de-sac. I’d come up for a look, and I’d seen what I’d come to look at. The Great Pitch of the Devil’s Kitchen is known to be a serious climb for a single-hander.

On the other hand, the cracks didn’t look difficult. So I climbed them.

The narrow ledges now led to the right, 50 feet above the cauldron’s floor. The rock immediately above the ledges was well broken: there would be small corners and angular handholds. I looked down the cracks I’d just climbed up, and decided not to think about whether I was able to climb back down them again. I also noticed that my slanting ascent had taken me outwards from the gully floor. A fall from this point would be, to say the least, uncomfortable.

I set out across the traverse. The ledges for the feet were not continuous. Early on, there was a gap of about a yard. But I was able to make a long stride to gain the handholds beyond. The continuing traverse looked less difficult, and as it progressed, the floor of the Kitchen would not be so far below me. The ridge of Glyder Fach, and the Devil’s Kitchen, single-handed and in a single day: this would be an acceptable small feat in Ogwen adventuring.

The next section bulged above the foot-ledge. It might, indeed, have turned me back—despite the discomfort of reversing what I had already crossed. However, there was a deep finger-crack, running crosswise immediately above the bulge, and this good hold would make the crossing possible. I shuffled sideways and—with the end of the climb so close above—was almost enjoying the way I was hanging back over the void, my weight supported by the strength of my fingers.

There must have been an instant when I felt the crack around my fingers start incrementally to widen, to creep into movement. A single breath later, and I was falling backwards; and knew that the whole of the rock I was clinging to had come away from the cliff face.

Well at least, I thought, I did finish off the book about Kummer’s Quartic—

A plaster model of Kummer’s Quartic Surface (from the 1905 edition)

Okay, it wasn't me after all. Ronald Turnbull Hudson was the first cousin of my grandfather. It was in 1903 that he attempted to solo the Devil's Kitchen; he is distinguished as only the second rock-climber to die in Snowdonia. eighty-seven years after his death, ‘Kummer’s Quartic Surface’ was still important enough to receive a new paperback edition from the Cambridge University Press.

I did try to be authentic about not calling Bristly Ridge ‘Bristly Ridge’ as the name hadn't come into use then. The details of the accident are from his obituary in the Mathematical Gazette, but more usefully from the account of a leading climber, J Archer Thomson, who visited the scene the following day.

What it feels like to climb unknown rock, unprotected, ignoring rather obvious dangers for the sake of nothing in particular – this is based, as it has to be, on personal experience; in particular, to a day on Liathach in 1971. I don’t, so far, know what it really feels like to fall to one’s death in the Devil’s Kitchen.