In reply to UKC News:
Top effort Neil.
And good choice in using a sport grade instead of UK tech grade too, Once upon a time - around the early 80s - there were two schools of thought as to whether the tech grade should be hardest move or cumulative technical difficulty. I was in the latter camp, which ultimately lost out. Since then though the tech grades given to hard routes have become increasingly useless, partly no doubt due to nobody ever being able to agree on what exactly a 'move' is! Recent years have also (likely for the same reasons) seen an increased use of French grades to describe the physical pitch difficulty, even for grit routes (for which one might expect a hardest move grade to be particularly relevant) so it's a shame that we're now using French grades for this instead of our own grades. The plus side of course is that Johnny foreigner also speaks the same grade language so won't need to scratch his/her head quite so much at all the strange symbols in the guide when he/she comes to climb in the UK.
Now, to start the long process of converting every HVS 5a to HVS V or HVS V+
On Sunday 21st September Neil Mawson made the first ascent of a new route in Pembroke near The Cauldron sector which he has named Choronzon. Its grade of E10 8b+ makes it Pembroke's hardest route yet.
