
Above: The west flank of the Eiger (in sunshine), first climbed by Irishman Charles Barrington in 1858. The infamous North Face is to the left, in the shade.
Charles Barrington from Bray, Co. Wicklow, led the first team to climb the Eiger. The craze for mountaineering in the Alps was pioneered by eccentric Englishmen. Young men of means on the Grand Tour or perhaps on their honeymoon would hire local guides and set off to ‘bag’ an unclaimed mountain—and, having reached the top, would open a bottle of champagne and toast the health of Queen Victoria. Then in 1857 the Alpine Club, the world’s first organised group of mountaineers, was founded. Its initial 281 members included 57 barristers, 34 clergymen, nineteen landed peers and fifteen dons. The first president was Dubliner John Ball, Liberal MP for Carlow. Barrington, then 24 years of age, was not a member and made just one visit to the Alps. Finding himself in the Swiss village of Grindlewald, it appears that he wagered on bagging an unclaimed mountain and chose the nearby Eiger (3,970m). With no previous mountaineering experience, he set out on the west face at 3am with two local guides and was on the summit by noon. Thereafter he returned to Ireland and never climbed seriously again: the nearest he ever came was to organise the first hill-running race up and down the Sugarloaf Mountain, after which he presented a gold watch, at his own expense, to the winner. Indeed, his main claim to fame was as owner, trainer and jockey of ‘Sir Robert Peel’, winner of the inaugural Irish Grand National at Fairyhouse in April 1870. Thanks to Mountaineering Ireland and others, his achievement in the Alps has been suitably marked in recent years with memorials in Grindlewald and in Bray.