No waterproof tents. No mixed-sex sleeping. No Mass on a Saturday night. Fifty years ago, camping and climbing in Kerry or Connemara was almost a religious experience - for one would have to have some bit of belief tucked in the rucksack if one wasn't to be driven to drink.
Ah, but they were different then, and dry of course, and made of sterner stuff. None of this fleece gear, thermal liners, triple-point fabric and Goretex boots. Instead it was Army surplus anoraks, bulky nether garments known as "lavatory trousers", and nails fitted to rubber soles.
Joss Lynam describes how his climbing partner operated on his footwear with a hand drill - ending up with half his fingers in sticking plaster. Writing in the recently published golden jubilee journal to mark 50 years of the Irish Mountaineering Club (IMC), he recounts how ropes were "heavy Manila or hemp, of doubtful strength and horrible to use when wet". They usually had one or two rope slings with karabiners, or steel links with spring clips, and it was "pretty obvious why pioneers carried pitons!"
Letters page
It was in late November of 1948 that it all began, and the club owes its origins to the Letters page of this newspaper. Lynam and a friend, Bill Perrott, suggested the formation of a mountaineering group. They were out in Luggala in Wicklow on the day their appeal was published, and returned to find a sheaf of telephone messages waiting for them.
Dublin's Central Hotel in Exchequer Street hosted the first meeting that December, and Robert Lloyd Praeger, naturalist and author of The Way That I Went, was elected as first president. Lynam can't be sure how many attended, as records are missing, but the first extant address list recorded 71. "At a time when most English and some Continental clubs were male only, we were determined to be mixed sex and that list included 20 women."
A twin aim was to make the club all-Irish. Three sections were established in Dublin, Belfast and among the Wild Geese - that is, emigrants. Sadly, as he notes, "the fissiparous nature of Irish institutions got the better of us, and we are back to one club now, one among the 96 in the Mountaineering Council of Ireland."
Early on, the essential female input required a little encouragement. The first Alpine meet was held in the summer of 1949, and Lynam conned his sister into joining by pretending that another woman was travelling too. He does not mention, in his personal account of the club's founding, at what stage his sister began to speak to him again.
Transport improvements extended the geographical boundaries of an activity which comprised both hill-walkers and climbers, with less of a dichotomy in the early years. The main development was in Donegal, where new routes were climbed in areas like Lough Barra by pioneers such as Betty Healy, author and former editor of Ireland of the Welcomes. By the time Glenveagh was being explored in the 1960s, equipment had also become much better and safer. No longer would one be photographed in Dalkey quarry with a suit, light shoes and a tobacco pipe in mouth, as an early committee member was - one of many images now reproduced in the jubilee journal.
Cottage and hut
Not everyone had access to transport, however, and the hut was the answer to those who needed somewhere to stay on a Saturday night. In 1957, the club bought a cottage in Glendasan with the aid of a grant from Guinness and loans and gifts from members, and this was matched by the Bloat House, a hut for northern members in the Annalong Valley. Kathleen Price was appointed first warden in Wicklow. "It was well-used during the 1950s, 60s and 70s," according to Lynam, and was "the scene of parties, drinking and rows."
Of rows there have been many, for mountaineering was and is as political as any other outdoor pursuit. Alpine expeditions became regular, and the first Irish expedition left for the Himalayan peak of Rakaposhi in 1964. Beginners' courses were organised in Dalkey quarry, and by the 1970s and 1980s, membership surpassed the 200 mark.
Still "healthy and growing", the IMC hosts regular sessions for newcomers in the quarry on Thursday evenings, and weekend multi-pitch climbs based at the club hut in Glendasan. The exploits of many members, recorded in its own journal, have been reproduced in the jubilee edition, edited by Lynam and Peter O'Neill. An anniversary dinner has been held in Glendalough, and the club is hosting the annual meeting of the Mountaineering Council of Ireland in Co Wicklow next weekend. Although there have been changes in faces, places, gear, perhaps the most dramatic, as recounted in the publication, is in the landscape. Describing a return visit to "Playbank", between Cavan and Leitrim, the Dublin climber Gerry Moss notes how there were "no cattle on the hill field, no fresh cowpats way-marking the little trail leading to the rough grazing on the open mountain." He and his companions met no one and saw no one, and there was no movement anywhere - "only that all-pervading quiet that Joseph Campbell has dubbed "the silence of unlaboured fields".
Abandoned farms
The picture is the same all over the uplands of Cavan, Leitrim and Sligo, he says. "The little hill-farms are being abandoned and whole communities, a whole way of life, is disappearing as the old people die off and the young people opt out of the struggle to wrest a living from poor, marginal land. And, as the hill-folk retreat, the trees advance. Everywhere, on all sides, stands of sitka spruce and lodgepole pine creep relentlessly forward, enveloping the little fields, the low stone walls, the old dwellings, the ancient trackways, smothering whole townlands under a carpet of green, like a latter-day blanket bog."
IMC 50, the history of the Irish Mountaineering Club plus 35 of the best articles from its journal, is available at £5 from gear shops or from Joss Lynam at 7 Sorbonne, Ardlilea, Dublin 14. Email:joss@indigo.ie. Add £1.20 for postage and packing. A videotape of routes and person- alities from the past, as well as footage of the 1964 Rakaposhi expedition, is available at £8 from Alan Pope, 31 Knocknashee, Dublin 14, tel (01)2981869.