Early climbers slotted pebbles and chock-stones into rock fissures and cracks then threaded a length of rope around to make an anchor or belay. ‘Someone’ then realised you could thread some rope through a nut (as in nuts and bolts) and the hexagonal shape would wedge in very nicely, you could put different sizes of nut on one piece of rope to fit different crack sizes. This early use of nuts led to just about every form of rock protection for generations to come, receiving the generic term ‘nuts’.

Back in the 1960s when companies like Clog & Troll started making the first commercially produced ‘nuts’ they made them hexagonal in shape like real nuts, a multitude of variations followed over the subsequent decades, many still encompassing the original shape.

Clog and Troll used various materials to make their nuts, mostly variations of aluminium alloys, though both at some point decided that brass was a good idea and we have two excellent examples of Troll brass nuts here in the collection dating, we think, from the late 1960s. For some reason or other brass wasn’t popular, and not many were made, so we are delighted to have these two in the collection.