Making ADRA

I settled down to watch Adra with a pencil resting on my pad next to the laptop. I prefer notetaking with a pencil. I like the feel of lead dragging across the page. There’s a tactility to it that you don’t get with a pen; a closer relationship to the act of writing. It reminds me of fingertips running along a climbing edge, every micro feature and imperfection revealed. It was a day or so before I interviewed the film’s Director, Emma Crome and I wanted to take notes of the key moments. Instead, my pencil remained where it was and I became utterly engrossed in a story that felt familiar and new all at once; nostalgic and forward looking, calming and exciting. A film that somehow embodies what it is to climb in the most generic sense, while focusing on a very specific story.

“How do you condense 50 plus years of climbing history into 50 minutes?” Emma is reflecting on the challenge that faced her as she began filming what would become Adra, back in 2022. It was never meant to be such. Her original brief was for a short reflective piece; ten minutes or so. It didn’t take long to realise that to even come close to doing the intricate and complex weave and weft of stories of landscape and characters and relationships and feats and living memories justice, the scale and the scope of the project would have to grow. Fortunately Pertex were sold on the idea, and all that was left to do was begin to gather the hundreds of threads.

Despite the practical difficulties of filming such a broad ranging film, the narrative is simple; a multi-voiced love letter to a place, its geography, language and its community all bundled into one. Adra. North-Walian for home. Home in the deepest, most meaningful sense of the word. Not just the roof above one’s head, not even a home that purely belongs to those who are native, be it through birth or residence. A sense of home that is as much about a feeling as it is a pin in a map.

Adra doesn’t just embrace the uniqueness and eccentricities of a place; it celebrates them. It explores what drew – and continues to draw – a collection of “weirdos, misfits, ne'er do wells and characters” [Nick Bullock] to a place that feels like the home of climbing to many of them. If Llanberis is the burning hearth of that home, the mountains and quarries and passes and crags and sea cliffs that lie beyond its doorstep are its backyard.

“Y dirwedd yw un o'r pethau mwyaf barddonol am Cymru”

“The landscape is one of the most poetic things about Wales” – Lewis Perrin

Before there was climbing, there were the mountains. Cotton grass bobbed in the wind, tides of clouds rolled around and under and over peaks. And that, for many of us, was what first drew us outside. Emma and I start at her personal beginning.

“I am not from North Wales. I’m from Devon. But, as children, we would always have our holidays up here. I had a topographical poster of Cadair Idris on my bedroom wall. We didn’t climb as a family, but our visits were full of hillwalking and the beach and freedom. I would feel a bit depressed when I returned home. My teachers would even comment that I was on my Welshcomedown. It is somewhere that I have returned to as an adult and always will do. It was the landscape that I primarily fell in love with and that love endures.”

“For a while, I had this imposter syndrome. I climb, but not particularly hard. Who am I to make this film? But, everyone has their own experience in the mountains and all are valid. It’s that interplay between the landscape and how we enjoy it that connects all of us in various ways. Whether it is hillwalking, running or mountaineering. We are all members of the same wider community. We’ve all fallen in love. We are just expressing that love in subtly different forms of play.”

The landscape has barely changed in the last 50 years; neither have the climbs. Yet Pritchard and Redhead and Dawes sit in front of the camera; once the top of their game, testing the bleeding edge of what was possible on rock, now effervescing with energy, but showing that even heroes age. Even Pete’s Eats; the cafe in the heart of Llanberis that was the thriving hub of the climbing community, has closed since the making of the film.

Paul Pritchard reflects; “every era has its own challenges and its own joy”. It’s a sentiment reflected by almost every climber in the film – a reverence for what has come before and what is still to come. Respect for and celebration of the evolution of climbing. Times were, are and will be different. New generations simultaneously follow and make their own path.

Adra deftly weaves archive and current footage together. We climb routes with multiple generations. We see a photo of Jim Perrin on Cenotaph Corner in 1970. Over forty years on, and his son bridges in the identical spot. The same moves are recreated over and over. The clothing may evolve from tweeds to lycra to floral shirts in Lewis Perrin’s case, but each time there is an instant connection between then and now. It’s a beautiful reminder that these climbs are historic artefacts - but the museum is a living, real one. One where you can pick up and inspect the exhibits, feel them and live them.

Adra tracks a path through history via a series of climbs, but it is the community who bring them to life. From the Pinnacle Club to the 80s superstars to McHaffie and Bullock to Zoë Wood and Lewis Perrin; our present-day guides over the rock.

“Zoë and Lewis’ voices were so important to the film”, explains Emma. “They bring energy and optimism and a sense that this is a story that isn’t yet fully told. They are multifaceted climbers, who enjoy and embrace every style that is now on offer, but with a depth of love and understanding for their context in a living landscape.”

And it is through climbing that many of the names of the past will endure. Zoë and Lewis climb “The Rainbow of Recalcitrance” in Dinorwig Quarry. The first ascent was by John Silvester in1984. He passed away in 2021. A microphone picks up Emma saying “an homage to John”, as Lewis walks up to the foot of the route.

For a moment, John Redhead laments what may be lost in modern climbing. “[There is a generation] searching for the move… instead of the spirit or the soul or another value that climbing can give you when you go into it – not in a farming sense – but a hunter-gather sense, which is what I was trying to do”.

This could be seen as a rare moment of “it was better in the old days” in a film where the rose-tinted spectacles are generally left at home, but it is quickly balanced by the new generation’s take on the same issue. It is perhaps Lewis Perrin who is most articulate on the matter. Sitting in a dormer window and bathed in sun, he speaks with the same considered, prose-like statements that are a signature of his father’s writing. He observes that while there may be more climbers now and a large percentage of them come to it from a very different direction than generations before, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t those that seek adventure and risk and see the place in which they climb as far more than a simple playground.

Emma: “One of my favourite moments making the film was the climbing on Cloggy [Clogwyn Du’r Arddu, part of the Wyddfa massif]. We set off up the path in the afternoon without a particular plan other than to get some footage of Lewis climbing. We almost literally bumped into Johnny Dawes on our way up and he decided to tag along; just an impromptu decision to see where the day took him.”

There’s a point in that segment where Dawes acts as the bridge between what went before him – “imagine back in the 50s trying that. That must have looked un-be-lievable and he’s [Joe Brown] in carbon rubber and he has one or two nuts on wire, a few pegs and slings, one or two fags and no more” – and the present. He seconds a route that Perrin floats up, all the while in sight of perhaps Dawes most famous first ascent; the horrifically hard and dangerous Indian Face. In other hands, this could be seen as depressing… an illustration of our inevitable decline with age. In reality, it is a beautiful, optimistic moment. “Just hanging around is what I like now. The climbing feels incidental, funnily enough.”

Back to Emma; “once we reviewed the footage, I knew this was the scene that the rest of the film would hang off. It was the touchstone for the feel and sentiment that I wanted to achieve throughout the story. A blend of community, climbing and landscape”.

“You don’t get many opportunities to make a film like this. The scale was frightening at times. I’d have these monumental highs when a piece of filming went really well. Then I’d find myself crying in Aldi car park. The logistical challenge of wading through archive footage, conducting over 20 interviews, filming climbing across multiple days on different crags; it was overwhelming. Huge credit should also go to Menna [Wakeford] for editing the hours of footage down into a cohesive story.

I think Adra is a film that could be made in a thousand ways. It’s like climbing a face; there are different routes you can take, different styles, different ways to interpret the fundamentals on which our stories are built.”

There is no single source of truth when it comes to history. Whether documenting world affairs or the much more important business of playing on rocks, there are differences in opinion and memory and lived experience. Anyone with a passing interest in the Welsh climbing scene of the 1980s, or perhaps even cutting edge climbing of the time will be aware of the rivalry between Johnny Dawes and John Redhead. Ego versus ego. Talent versus talent. A sense of a bubbling undercurrent of something that went beyond competitive natures. Perhaps time and distance soften memories. Either way, Adra makes it clear that the two climbers have – and probably always had – so much more in common than what separates them. Wildly different characters opine over their love of climbing and North Wales.

“I was emotionally invested in everyone in the film and only wanted to show them in the most generous, but truthful light. You have to roll up your sleeves and crack on when making a film. You might make mistakes, but it is always coming from a place of good instincts and intentions.”

In a world where it feels like so much of our day-to-day media is designed to push us apart and seek division, it feels like Adra does the opposite. Rather than dwell on our differences, Adra actively looks for commonalities and community.

“It’s a guilty secret, but I’m a massive fan of Richard Curtis films. They are so unashamedly full of love, kindness and sentimentality. That’s what I wanted to achieve with Adra.”

Taking the analogy of filmmaking to be like new routing up a face a little further, Adra now deserves to have its place in the Pete’s Eats notebook; documented and now to be enjoyed by the masses. As our conversation comes to an end, Emma and I talk about the transience of digital media compared to physical formats. In previous decades, Adra would have been released as VHS or DVD. It still somehow manages to keep that feel – something to be rewatched and revisited rather than scrolled past at the flick of a thumb. A moment in history preserved and celebrated for all generations.

Watch Adra on YouTube