Gwen Moffat

Gwen has been in the Pinnacle Club longer than anyone else — since 1949, coming up for 72 years — and she is also our oldest member. Her early mountaineering story is well known through her enduring classic book Space Below My Feet and subsequent autobiographical volumes. Space was published in 1961 — so she’s celebrating its diamond jubilee at the same time as the club celebrates its centenary.

Born in 1924 in Brighton, Sussex, Gwen was evacuated to the Yorkshire Dales at the start of World War 2, aged 16, and so her first ‘mountains’ were the Three Peaks of Yorkshire, ascended with school parties.

While she was strictly not supposed to go out on her own, Gwen did as she has always done and made her own rules, roaming the Dales with the neighbour's Irish terrier.

After working through the war as a carter’s assistant (adoring working with heavy horses) and then army driver and PE instructor, she deserted from the Army to join some Bohemians living in mid Wales and pursued a peripatetic lifestyle of climbing, wood cutting and odd-jobbing — including modelling for artists in Cornwall. She returned to the Army so that she could get her passport; she was offered the chance to stay on but already knew her future was as a climber.

Gwen (top) and friends at Whernside in 1941

Gwen’s first trip to the Alps, after she secured her passport, was in 1948 when she was 24. She joined the Pinnacle Club in 1949 and her daughter was born the same year. She eked out a living as a hostel warden and through writing — “My first fee came from Health and Efficiency about having a baby on a boat. Similar items followed with magazines, working up to the glossies and big money, selling talks to the BBC and broadcasting them in concert intervals. After some years there were no more rejection slips. That decade was my apprenticeship and I was often hungry.”

She consolidated her skills and reputation as an experienced mountaineer and became the first female British Mountain Guide in 1953, which provided an alternative but equally hard living travelling around the UK and Europe, Notable ascents with Vicki Russenberger in the 1950s include the Marinelli Couloir on the Monte Rosa, and in the Dolomites the Andrich Route on the Torre Venezia and Via Tissi on Torre Trieste. Later routes in the decade included the traverse of La Meije and the Younggrat on the Breithorn.

Gwen on guiding in the 1950s

“I've had a wide variety of clients, from the best (occasionally the tiger cub; often older people who climb quite well but don't want to lead because of family responsibilities) to the worst. The worst isn't very bad; newspaper reporters who are so eager before, terrified at the time, and proud afterwards. There are the very slow people not on the climb, but coming downhill, and the very heavy... But they all enjoy it and since the second qualification of a guide must be patience, one gets used to descending Tryfan in two hours flat (there are usually flowers and birds, and there is always conversation).
There are times when it becomes a little boring, when the old burns across the back are wakened into new and painful fire by fresh pressure, but such episodes are remembered only as cold facts. They are swamped by other memories: of pure joy in the eyes of natural climbers on their first climb and the wonder at the end of it, memories of elderly people carefully and neatly coming up Cneifion Arete, or looking at the cushions of moss campion on the Kitchen cliffs. It's a pleasant profession where you can make other people happy merely by doing something you enjoy yourself.” — ”Guiding”, Pinnacle Club Journal no. 8, 1951-58
> Read the journal article (PDF - opens in a new window)
Pictured: Gwen Moffat at the summit of Stob Coire nan Lochan, Glencoe, in 1957. Credit: JR Lees.

Gwen wrote Space Below My Feet (published 1961) after someone suggested they could write a book about her: she wasn’t having this — she was already an experienced writer, and her seminal book was published to rave reviews. After Space there were more books — On My Home Ground and Two Star Red — and always guiding. She returned to Wales in 1969 after her marriage broke up and wrote Survival Count, her last autobiographical volume, which highlighted her passion for the environment. Her publisher Livia Gollancz agreed to publish it on condition Gwen provide her with a crime novel, a new direction which worked with great success: the second book in the Miss Pink series was being drafted before Lady with a Cool Eye was even accepted.

She continued writing crime novels and guiding throughout the 70s, and then, after losing a friend in a climbing accident, accepted a commission to write a travel book about the California Trail in the US — travelling along it for six months as research. On return to the UK she realised she had fallen in love with the space, the wild open country of the US, and its magnificent nature. She reorganised her finances to spend the next 20 years between the American West and Wales: travelling, climbing and writing crime novels which were set in remote communities and wild country. Gwen wrote about some of these trips for the Pinnacle Club Journal — solo outings in wild landscapes.

Gwen+on+Sergeant+-+38+years+ago+1.jpg — Gwen on an off day in Arizona

“I knew nothing more about Havasu Creek than that it had good waterfalls, was on an Indian reservation and was fifty miles downstream of the Grand Canyon. While I waited for the snow to melt from the South Rim I thought a trip to Havasu would while away a couple of days. I was fresh from the deserts which, in April, become uncomfortably hot for mountaineering. Strolling by water would make a pleasant change. The first indication that this new back country wasn't dry came on the highway in northern Arizona when I asked at a garage where the dirt road took off for Havasu. It was impassable in spring, the man said, even for a four-wheel drive. I retreated thirty miles and took a blacktop road tor fifty miles: climbing through range country, then junipers, then pines. One car passed me. I saw no occupied houses. The blacktop gave out and a dirt road brought me to the rim of the upper Havasu Canyon.“ — “Off-Day Arizona Style”, Pinnacle Club Journal no. 19, 1982-84
> Read the journal article (PDF - opens in a new window)
Pictured: Gwen on Sergeant - Bozeman, Montana newspaper article, 1983.

In 2015, Gwen starred in Claire Carter and Jen Randall’s short film Operation Moffat, inspired by her autobiography and including interviews with her. The film won over 20 awards at international film festivals.

Gwen settled near Penrith in 1990 with a series of cats and published her last crime novel, Gone Feral, in 2007. She chose the Lakes as a base because she didn’t know it well and there is lots to explore: the Lakes themselves, the Northern Pennines, the Southern Uplands and the Borders — a relatively wild and spacious land. She counts her last hill as Great Dodd on her 90th birthday, and still gets out for cunningly planned trips to interesting bits of nature; to find an adder on the Solway marshes is still an ambition.

Currently Gwen contributes articles to mountain magazines and reviews crime novels, and keeps up with her friends and many admirers by email. Her autobiography Space Below my Feet has endured as a best-selling book and an inspiration for other artists and authors.