Ricardo Cassin was a famous Italian mountaineer who started making his own climbing gear in a little village called Lecco in 1947. The Cassin brand burgeoned into a big international company, and one of their many products were the pitons we have here in the collection. Dating from the 1960s, they were the most popular brand of piton in the UK back then, along with Austrian company, Stubai. The Ministry of Defence (MOD) had some pitons made during the Second World War, though we’re not sure who made them. It was in the late 1960s that a company called Clogwyn (Clog) started making pitons, managing to capture most of the UK piton market from Stubai and Cassin. Nuts, chocs, wires, tape slings and cams came along in the next couple of decades and pitons were pretty much consigned to heritage collections and history books. Some are still available, much used by big wall climbers and winter climbers like them as they bite nicely into icy cracks.

The three we have here in the collection are the ‘horizontals’ that show as 6/7/8 on the piton page of the 1968 LD Mountain Centre catalogue – above.