Wild Country came into being in 1977 when Mark Vallance went into business with American climber, Ray Jardine, who had invented a camming device which he called a ‘friend’. Having failed to get a backer for his product in the USA, Vallance saw the potential and they went into production in Tideswell, Derbyshire in 1978 and the project was a huge success. Wild Country went from strength to strength in the 1980’s with an ever increasing range of equipment to complement the ‘friend’. In 1986 they acquired Clog, an ailing, North Wales equipment company and while we are not sure of the detail, it seems that production of Friends moved to North Wales for a time and for some reason or other Friends were produced under the Clog brand name; three fine examples of which we have here in the collection. We suspect these three cams date from around 1989/90 since Wild Country produced the first flexible stem Friends in 1988 and we’re assuming the Clog variety came along fairly soon after, or maybe even at the same time. Anyway, another fine piece of climbing history for our collection. Mick Tighe bought these three Friends on e-bay for a few pounds in 2015.