In reply to JamesRoddie:
> (In reply to no_more_scotch_eggs)
>
> Depends on your definition of "very exposed" I guess - in summer I've soloed it without a second thought several times and haven't really been aware of the exposure.
>
> In winter I've soloed in once and it felt pretty committing for the grade, and the drop below you feels a fair bit bigger.
Me and a mate did Castle years back on a beautiful day, - got sunburnt! I still don't know if we were lost but I tried this short steep crack that we took to be the crux and got shut down by it. If I remember right it was dry so I even tried taking one crampon off to do it again and still not doing it. Ed spied a short steep icefall to its left and climbed that getting us back on route. Oddly, I don't remember much else about the route, but if we were on route jolly good effort soloing that!
And to put it in some context, we had stormed up Tower Ridge in good consolidated but very wintery conditions the day before in about 3.5 hours, only belaying out of the DGB gap, and the Eastern Traverse to tower gap bit, so we weren't total punters. Castle struck me as way more technical than anything on Tower, although as I say, we might have managed to get lost.