UKC

Apparently named well before the first ascent. I have found a reference online to Menlove Edwards top roping it in the 30's.  Peter Harding named (I presume) Ivy Sep. Could be him? None of my Pass guides (going back to the Hatton guide of 1974) is of any help.

Anyone got a copy of Perrin's Menlove or Trevor Jones Welsh Rock that might say?

According to "Welsh Rock" it was named by Menlove Edwards.

The Alpine Journal has Menlove Edwards as the person who named it in the 1930's 

That's what I thought. Thanks all.

Does anyone know why it was named after an empty tomb? Cenotaphs are usually monoliths.

I always thought Cemetery Gates was so named because a hearse was on the road below. I assumed the corner was named after that, seems I was wrong (again).

Wasn’t it the destination on the front of a bus in Manchester somewhere, as seen by Brown and/or Whillans? Or was that something else?

Maybe it was though the corner resembled what was left after a monolith for a cenotaph had been removed.

Nope thats exactly it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-m_P_RzrQu4&t=8m30s

Thank you for that link. Just fantastic.

Interesting question. Menlove-Edwards wouldn’t have ‘named’ it glibly. A cenotaph is a memorial to persons whose remains are elsewhere, so particularly appropriate to war dead.

I don’t have Perrin’s book, which i think is pretty definitive, maybe it’s not covered in there anyway.

Maybe it’s just because it’s a clean cut right angled corner?

A Cromlech is already a huge stone monument, so maybe the book-like central section brought to mind lists of fallen soldiers carved into smooth rock. The Corner reference would then be simply that part of the cenotaph up which the climb goes.

Only I think the bus was in Chester not Manchester (it was: ‘The Hard Years’ Joe Brown. Pg 76)

Chester bus!

The Welsh name 'Gromlech' means a place of burial and so is most likely named as such back in the foggy mists of time.

Haha they didn't mention that, excellent knowledge I also last night failed to make the link properly, they discuss the route name at 8:30

Surely one obvious reason is that the Cromlech Boulders have often been assumed to have 'fallen out of' the Corner?? Anyhow, it's a perfect name, and Brown and Whillans were geniuses to top it with Cemetery Gates.

The description of Dinas Cromlech in J.E.Q Barford's 1944 guide "Three Cliffs in Llanberis" refers to the tremendous square cut corner, Cenotaph Corner, with a small clean-cut corner  - Sabre Cut - to its left and a jagged, untidy, vegetable crack on its right - Ivy Sepulchre.  Of this trio, only Sabre Cut had been climbed.  No indication of who named these features, but Cenotaph Corner and Ivy Sepulchre  were clearly named before 1944 and before they were first climbed.

It's good that such a good crag has such good names.

I'm surprised no one ever cut to The chase and called their climb "Death by falling a long way".

Barford climbed and named the Cenotaph Corner Finish in 1939, so it is likely the corner feature was already known as 'Cenotaph Corner'.