In reply to Jon Read:
This sub section of the thread seems to me to be about whether the route looks " top notch". Views on that are always going to be subjective, and, unless informed by a visit to the crag, largely derived from photos. And they will probably come from a point of view of looking at the route rather than from the route. I don't know Franco well but I hope I get part of his aesthetic: a sense of place seems important to him, as it is to me. I haven't climbed at Kay Nest, but have run past it on long slow moor top runs and seen that wall appear above an age old wood, which itself appears as a miracle after the heather desert and bulldozer wounds. It is far enough away from the day to day world that a project there would be something that would burn itself into a receptive psyche, it would be a joy to hold in the memory for as long as memory lasted. And to be on that wall, on the lead, in that place, with the "scruffiness" of the buttress and the obscurity making it all the more deliciously pointless: it works for me.
( full disclosure: I grew up in, and still live on the edge of, the north yorks moors)
