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3 unusual facts about Walter Parry Haskett Smith


Great Langdale

The fell has a small sharp summit below which rises Gimmer Crag, which is one of the top rock climbing venues in the Lake District, the crag is made of Rhyolite rock and was pioneered in the early 1880s by the father of British rock climbing Walter Parry Haskett Smith.

Walter Parry Haskett Smith

On a university reading party at Aber, Wales, in 1880, Haskett Smith became interested in exploring local cliffs, and in 1881 he journeyed to the Lake District and took a room at the inn at Wasdale Head, staying there for two months, meeting Frederick Herman Bowring, an enthusiastic fell-scrambler some forty years older, and, in essence, becoming Bowring's protégé.

Born in Kent, England, the son of a wealthy landowner, he attended Eton where he excelled at athletics, before enrolling in Trinity College, Oxford.



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