Deadman anchors have been used for centuries to hold things in place, or for attaching some kind of pulley system to move things around. Although the name would seem to imply that some helpless corpse was used at some point in history, we haven’t found any documentary evidence of that, the more likely system would be to bury logs or stones in soil, sand or snow with a rope or cable wrapped around it for attachment. It’s thought that the first deadman anchors for mountaineering derived from dog sled drivers who used sheets of wood to anchor their dog teams in the snow. Scottish climber, John Cunningham worked for the British Antarctic Survey in the 1950s and we know that he experimented with metal and aluminium anchors in the Cairngorms on his return, though tradition has it that Denny Moorehouse of Clog Equipment was one of the first to produce a commercially available deadman back in the 1970s.

We’ve got a fairly early Clog deadman here in the collection. It once belonged to Lochaber Mountain Rescue Team and looks like it’s been well hammered into the snows of Ben Nevis on several occasions.

We had an interesting note from Mountain Guide, Kathy Murphy:-

“On Gasherburn II in 1989 we made our own version out of the bottom of plastic barrels threaded with thin cord – they were somewhat rounder and larger than the deadman – understandably so – we called them deadwomen!!! (they were also more difficult to place!).”