Up until the last few weeks lakes drytooling has been a mystical underworld of dark damp quarries, but all this has now changed.

After the Lakes winter ethics debate a motivated team of active lakes winter climbers made the decision to hunt out and equip a proper drygtooling venue in the Lakes. Establishing a proper drytooling spot would eliminate the risk of people taking this element of our sport out on to the treasured lakeland crags.

Brian Davison, Paddy Cave, Steve Ashworth and a Yorkshire tooling possie headed up by Phil Powell and Ian Durham have created a great new venue for drytooling with a lot of scope for further development.

With 14 routes and counting and grades ranging from M4 up there's something for most people and Lakes winter climbing will hopefully reap the benefits of a dedicated training venue.

The route descriptions, crag location, topos and more can be found on Paddy's website over at Mountain Circles

Thanks go to Andy Rutherford for the use of his photos in this report.