The vast majority of pitons have the makers’ name stamped on them, you’ll find loads of them elsewhere in the collection: Hiatt; Stubai; Cassin; Charlet-Moser; Clog etc. The absence of a name usually indicates that the piton is homemade, and we think that’s the case with the two we have here in the collection. Both would have been fashioned in someone’s workshop, or more likely in an engineering workshop where more tools were available.

We reckon that they both date from the 1960s, possibly a little earlier, a time when there were very few pitons made in the UK and most were imported, primarily from Stubai in Austria. It was also a time when modern forms of rock protection had not been invented, so pitons ruled. So, if you couldn’t get them, or couldn’t afford them, you made your own,

One of them is much better made than the other, though both could, and maybe should, go down as ‘Mountain Art’. Nuts, Chocs, Friends etc eventually took over from the piton and the cartoon above, taken from the March 1973 Summit magazine, shows the triumph of the nut over the piton.