Climbing without a chalk bag

The Dorset coast is a great place to live in summer, and it’s only a few miles from my house to one of England’s finest beaches - Durdle Door. The scenery is spectacular and so are the crowds, but the beach is almost a mile long and at the western end you can escape the hordes and swim in deep clear water with huge chalk cliffs towering above. It even has its own sea stack. Butter Rock is hardly a rival to the Old Man of Hoy, a 40 ft chalk tower with only one recorded climb - a severe called Butterfingers which still sports a dagger in the guidebook to indicate that it has not had a known second ascent in over 20 years.

Butter Rock

That needed rectifying, so I persuaded Carolyn, my partner on various sea stack escapades, to join me for another stupid adventure. Unlike the Old Man of Hoy, Butter Rock is a proper sea stack as it is always surrounded by water, but on a low tide you can wade across and scramble up to a ledge on the seaward side, from where a steep slab gives the obvious way to the top. There were no useful runners but the climbing was easy and I was soon on the summit, a narrow ridge like the apex of a roof but devoid of any belay apart from a sling draped optimistically round a semi-detached lump of chalk.

How do you get down from a sea stack with no belay? That’s when a simultaneous abseil is a handy technique to have in your armoury. It sounds alarming but we had already tried it out a couple of years back on Bantham Hand (a sea stack in South Devon that is highly recommended to those with a liking for esoteric adventures) and survived to tell the tale. The only problem here was that when the abseil rope was loaded it dug into the crumbly rock, so that our descent was accompanied by small bits of chalk falling off all around us, but all was well and we were soon back on terra firma.

Butter Rock was good fun, but was really just the amuse-bouche before a much more substantial feast of chalk climbing. Skeleton Ridge is a 500 ft HVS route up the ridge behind the Needles on the Isle of Wight. It had been on my radar for a while, but I was a bit apprehensive. HVS on chalk? I usually struggle to climb HVS on proper rock, so I sought advice from my friendly local BMC ex-president, who is pictured in the guide book sitting astride the ridge in an imperial pose. He assured me that it was not too hard.

Skeleton Ridge is a route that needs a bit of advance planning, even after you have found someone foolish enough to join you on a madcap adventure up a loose chalk ridge. First, you need to pick a fine day with a low spring tide and calm sea. Then you need to arrange with the National Trust to let you into the Old Battery, a Victorian fort on the headland where the route finishes. Finally you need to contact the Coastguard to make sure that they don’t try and rescue you.

It took a while to get all of that organised, but that is how Norman and I came to be waiting outside the Old Battery at 8.30 am last July. Numerous notices warned of the danger of venturing onto 'sheer cliff faces'. So in these days of omnipresent elf’n’safety restrictions, it was refreshing to find that the National Trust man was extremely sympathetic to our activities, arriving early so we could catch the 9 am low tide, showing us where to find the abseil stake, looking after our sacs while we did the climb, and letting us use his loo, an important consideration as the close up view of crumbling chalk cliffs had proved to be a very efficient laxative.

The approach to the climb involves two contrasting abseils – 20 ft down a wall into the moat that guards the landward side of the fort, then 300 ft down a steep slope of disintegrating chalk, flint and grass to reach the beach in Scratchell’s Bay. We had to join two ropes together, but passing the knot was simple as the slope was hardly any steeper than the Idwal Slabs, even if somewhat less solid.

Starting the 300 ft abseil

At low tide we were able to amble along the beach without getting our feet wet, to where the climb starts up a 50 ft slab leading to a saddle on the ridge. This was rather exciting, as most of the holds were small chunks of flint embedded in the chalk, and there was no gear apart from a rusty peg that was too low to be of any use, so I was relieved when none of the flints snapped off before I reached the crest of the ridge, where some kind soul had placed a brand new peg to back up the two rusting relics that formed the belay.

The approach to Skeleton Ridge. The first pitch climbs to the saddle above Norman.

An easy scramble led to what was supposed to be the crux, where the ridge rose up as a steep and very exposed arête, equipped with another two pegs that were well past their use-by date. Now if you have been paying attention you will have realised a chalk bag is not needed on this route, so there is no tell-tale line of white splodges to show you the best handholds. On the other hand, smears of black rubber show up rather well, marking out the footholds that have been used before and are, you hope, less likely to explode in a cloud of dust when you trust your weight to them. Helped by this, I tiptoed gently up the ridge, pleased to find that it was actually quite straightforward and rather less scary than the first pitch.

The crux pitch

The next two pitches were simple enough, with some scrambling interspersed with a few knife-edge sections where we teetered along gingerly, trying not to provide any excitement for the watchers in the tourist boats down below, until we came to a ledge where the final pitch reared ominously upwards. A steep arête turned out to be an action replay of the third pitch, except for a pristine stainless steel peg that offered a welcome measure of security. That led to the highlight of the climb – an extraordinarily exposed horizontal arête that reminded me of the famous description of the Inaccessible Pinnacle on Skye – ‘a knife-edged ridge, with an overhanging and infinite drop on one side, and a drop on the other side even steeper and longer’. A slight exaggeration maybe, but not much, as the ridge was only a few inches wide, the drop on the South side was plumb vertical for 200 ft to the beach below, and the North side was almost as steep. Fortunately a sling round a large boss of chalk provided a good runner to safeguard my ungainly progress as I shuffled along the ridge in classical à cheval style. Our 70 m sport rope reached a convenient anchor on an old look-out, so I was able to go back and belay securely on the edge to take photos of Norman posing on the final arête with the ridge and the Needles as a dramatic backdrop.

Posing on the final knife-edged arete

A quick clamber over the safety fence and we were back with the tourists in the Old Battery. Scott was right – the climbing is not hard (we thought only about 4b) and the chalk is pretty solid where it matters. It’s one of the UK’s great sea cliff adventures, it’s almost on our doorstep and there is a coffee shop right where you top out. Get on it before it falls down!

Stacks of Fun

It was a long way to come for 60 metres of crumbling sandstone. Getting to the start had involved an 800-mile drive, a week of waiting for good weather, a long walk followed by a yomp across boggy moorland, a steep scramble down a big cliff, skating over slippery rocks along the foreshore, and a character-building swim where the water temperature was a chilly 11^oC. An enthusiasm for climbing sea stacks can make you do strange things.

Like most climbers of a certain age, I first came across sea stack climbing by watching the BBC outside broadcast of the Old Man of Hoy in 1967, with an all-star cast including Joe Brown and Chris Bonington.  You can find clips on the internet (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6aYKZwr15k) and it is real old school climbing – no chalk, no sticky boots, no cams (in fact hardly any runners at all), but EBs, breeches, woolly socks and the talent to be able climb Extreme while simultaneously giving a laconic running commentary and smoking a roll-up.

A few years later I made a first visit to the far north west of Scotland. We came to enjoy the wonderful miniature mountains of Suilven and Stac Polly, but we also took time out to visit the Stoer peninsular, with its beautiful white sand beaches, stunning panorama of the mountains of Assynt and Coigach and its own Old Man.  The Old Man of Stoer is a spectacular 60 metre pinnacle and looks quite a challenge with his bulging beer-belly, but when I found out that the climb was only VS he was quickly added to the List Of Things To Do.

The Old Man of Stoer

He stayed on The List for over 30 years before I came back to climb him with Carolyn Lyness in 2005. That was one of those rare days when everything went according to plan – the weather was perfect on our first day in the area, there was a rope in place for the tyrolean traverse so we didn’t have to get wet, and the route gave four pitches of superb VS climbing. I was so impressed I even wrote an article for this newsletter.

Soon after that I finally got round to finishing the Munros and, needing an excuse to keep going to Scotland, started visiting the islands. In 2011 it was time for Orkney, so Liz and I booked up for a week on the largest island (confusingly called Mainland) and a few days on two of the smaller islands.  It was meant to be a non-climbing trip, but it seemed a shame to go all that way and not do the Old Man of Hoy.  At E1 it’s a bit too hard for me to lead, so I tried to see if I could find a guide to take me up.

There didn’t seem to be any local guides, but after a search of UK Climbing I came across a bloke who ran a small guiding business and had taken clients up the Old Man.  I emailed to ask if he could help.  No, he was off to the Alps for the summer but his mate might be able to help.  And he was not just any old mate - his friend turned out to be the editor of the SMC guide books and all-round Scottish climbing legend, Andy Nisbet.

We fixed up a date for the climb. Andy was very helpful – we agreed to get in touch the weekend before and change the date if the forecast looked better, and if the weather was really dire we would bin the whole plan and he wouldn’t charge me. 

I need not have worried, as it turned out that Andy’s many attributes include the ability to predict the weather six weeks in advance. The forecast for the chosen day could not have been better, and on the night before Liz and I walked round the stone circle of the Ring of Brodgar in magical evening light before driving down to meet Andy in Stromness. I had wondered how we would recognise each other, but there was no mistaking our man as he came off the ferry, with his huge rucksack and bushy ginger beard – a Scottish mountaineer straight from central casting.

Next morning we were back in Stromness to catch the early ferry across to Hoy, where Andy had arranged a taxi to take us to Rackwick on the other side of the island. The walk from here to the Old Man is a marvellous prelude to the climb, starting from Rackwick Bay with its beautiful sandy beach and huge red sandstone cliffs, then walking along the cliff top with the skuas wheeling overhead and grand views across the Pentland Firth to the hills of Caithness and Sutherland. From a mile away your sense of anticipation is heightened as the top of the Old Man pops up over the moor, but nothing more is revealed until you reach the viewpoint opposite the stack, peer over the edge…

… and pick your jaw up of the ground, for no matter how many photos and films you have seen, nothing can prepare you for a first close-up view of this extraordinary 135 metre pinnacle. From here, level with the top of the stack and a couple of hundred metres away, the climb looks especially daunting and it is hard to believe that, of the five pitches on the climb, only one is harder than VS.

Andy Nisbet on the descent path to the Old Man of Hoy. The route follows the face on this side of the stack.

But what a pitch that is! An hour or so later I was contemplating it with some anxiety, even from the supposed safety of the blunt end of the rope. You start from a spacious platform 40 metres up, but have to move out onto the East Face and its frightening exposure. Below, the face is undercut, so you look straight down to the boulder beach below your feet, while above you the face bulges out into big overhangs, emphasised by a fixed rope (more of that anon) hanging way out in space and swaying in the breeze.  You have to climb down a little corner and then traverse for about 8 metres – nothing too hard but there were no runners and I was all too aware that a slip would result in a monster pendulum ending miles out from the rock and a long prusik to regain contact, so there were a few anxious moments before I reached the end of the traverse where the rope was directly above. The difficult climbing now starts, but the rest of the pitch is 20 metres of remarkable climbing, finding a way through seriously overhanging terrain, mostly by hugely exposed bridging moves but without anything too strenuous.

Two rather scruffy pitches follow to take you to the grand finale, ‘an Orcadian Cenotaph Corner’. It’s just as steep as the Llanberis version, but with much bigger holds and without the polish, and gives a wonderful 30 metre VS pitch to the top. 

The Old Man of Hoy with Andy and me on top. Photo from a walker who we met later on the ferry.

It was a special privilege to be able to enjoy this spectacular summit on such a perfect day, so we lazed around for a while, enjoying the views and posing for the photographers on the cliff opposite, before starting back down.  For the first abseils the only problem is to convince yourself that there is some safety in numbers in the vast collection of rotten wires, pegs and bolts that form the belays, but the abseil down the crux pitch is more exciting; clipped into a fixed rope and hanging way out from the rock before being pulled back to the stance.

The free abseil down the crux pitch.

After I got back I posted a few photos on Facebook and a certain Mr Stevens commented ‘Am Buachaille next?’ Now that was a challenge.

Am Buachaille is the third in the holy trinity of classic Scottish sea stacks that were first climbed by Tom Patey in the 1960s. It doesn’t have the same profile as the two Old Men – there is no write-up in Patey’s book One Man’s Mountains and it sees far fewer ascents – but it looked to be a most excellent adventure in a stunning location.

Am Buachaille, showing the channel that guards the base of the stack.

Carolyn was still up for a challenge so we made the long drive north last June.  Unfortunately the weather was not cooperating; after almost a week we had only managed a few short routes on the sea cliffs of Skye and Rieff, and we drove into Scourie on an afternoon of continuous rain. But things were looking up, as a couple of dry days were forecast and we were getting youthful reinforcement in the shape of Carolyn’s son Chris, obviously a chip off the old block and happy to make a 1200 mile round trip to look after his mum on a wee adventure. 

We met Chris in the car park at the start of the Sandwood bay path, where he had arrived at 3 am after driving up from North Wales and then dossed in the car. Carolyn’s maternal instincts then kicked in, so we got out the stove to give Chris some breakfast before setting out for Am Buachaille. 

A couple of hours later we were on the tidal platform opposite the stack and trying to work out how to get across the 10-metre channel of deep water that separates it from the foreshore. The game plan was to pack all our gear into dry bags and send the youngster across with a spare rope, which we then used to haul across the gear before we oldies swam across. A post on UKC had observed that ‘the water temperature encourages you to cross with Thorpe-like speed’; this was indeed true, but as my swimming technique is some way short of Olympic standard I just got Chris to pull me across on the rope.

Contemplating a cold swim.

We dried off and sorted out the gear, and I was soon contemplating the first pitch,  a 20-metre near-vertical wall with big holds protruding like stacked dinner plates, but on rock that crumbled when touched and seemed likely to snap off without warning, so that the dinner plates felt more like giant digestive biscuits. I should have sent the lad up first, but there was no great technical difficulty and a lifetime of climbing at Swanage increases your immunity to this sort of thing. It was still a relief to get up without any holds breaking off and reach the sanctuary of a vast ledge, so large that we didn’t worry too much about the belay on a load of rusting pegs bashed into solidified mud and linked with some old washing line.

We pointed Chris at the next pitch – an awkward corner to start, then sneaking out to easier climbing where the main problem was to keep on the right side of an angry-looking fulmar. The fulmars seem to be an occupational hazard on Scottish sea stacks; so far we had remained unscathed but Carolyn was not so lucky this time and ended up with a beakful of foul-smelling orange gunk on the back of her jacket.

Carolyn on the last pitch. The dark patch on her sleeve is fulmar vomit.

The last pitch was a deep overhanging crack, fortunately with a good Hex at the base, which reminded me of the top of Climbers Club Direct at the Dewerstone. I adopted the same technique – stuff as many limbs as possible into the crack to avoid falling off, and use any remaining body parts to wriggle upwards. That was supposed to be the end of the difficulties, but a little wall gave a sting in the tail with an awkward mantelshelf onto a ledge covered with loose blocks and the usual collection of abseil tat that marks the top of the route.

Carolyn and Chris on top of Am Buachaille, Sandwood Bay in the background.

We had plenty of time to enjoy the summit, goofing around posing for photos with the views of Sandwood Bay and Cape Wrath as a backdrop.  Unlike the exciting free abseils on Hoy and Stoer, the descent is quite tame and we were soon back on the ground for the return swim and a visit to the beautiful beach at Sandwood Bay before the long walk home.

Am Buachaille.

So how do the stacks stack up? Stoer has the best climbing, with sound rock and good protection, a great introduction to sea stacking and one of the best days out in Britain for the VS climber. Am Buachaille is the most adventurous with its long approach, tidal complications, mandatory swim and dubious rock. But Hoy reigns supreme; the most spectacular, twice as big as the other two, and with two pitches of outstanding climbing. It’s also the only route where, so long as you buy the right brand, you can be reminded of a great climb whenever you buy a packet of oatcakes in Tesco. But whichever stack you choose, you are assured of a memorable day out in grand surroundings.