Looking for the Best

What’s the best VS in Britain?  A good topic for discussion in the pub, internet chat rooms or magazine articles, although the author in ‘On the Edge’ who gave the accolade to a 20 foot boulder problem within sight of a fast-food van on Dartmoor needs to get out more.  I’ve been looking for a long time, mainly because of a pathetic inability to climb any harder, and I have fond memories of personal favourites in all parts of the country, from the Cornish sea cliffs to the Scottish Highlands, but there were two particular routes which had somehow escaped my attention and seemed a suitable target for the summer.

So when a visit to Pen y Clogwyn with the Lyness clan coincided with a rare spell of settled weather, there was only one place to go.  I’m not sure if Carolyn knew quite what she was letting herself in for, as she seemed surprised when we had been plodding up the hill for over an hour and still not reached the crag, but she didn’t complain too much and we were soon leaving the Snowdon tourist track and taking the climbers’ path round under the cliff. 

‘Clogwyn Du’r Arddu; The Black Cliff; The Temple; The Mecca; The Shrine of British climbing’.  That’s what the guidebook says, and for once the hype is entirely justified. Even the religious metaphors seem appropriate, for the change in atmosphere as you go from a sunny hillside into the cool shadow of the crag is like entering a medieval cathedral on a hot summer’s day. 

We moved along to the start of Great Slab, the only easy way through the overhangs which guard the entry to the vast overlapping slabs of the West Buttress.  I could see that Carolyn was a little unnerved by the atmosphere and scale of the place, a common reaction on a first visit to Cloggy, but I persuaded her to lead the superb first pitch of Great Slab and of course she coped OK.  So far this was familiar ground as Great Slab had been my first route on Cloggy back in the seventies, but I wanted to do the Great Slab / Bow-Shaped Slab combination, which takes the best bits of classic routes by two of the great pioneers of Welsh climbing, Colin Kirkus and Menlove Edwards, 550 feet of climbing up the middle of the West Buttress, and generally reckoned to be the finest VS in Wales (or at least until the new guide upgraded it to HVS).

A staircase of holds up an exposed rib took us up to the crux of Bow-Shaped, traversing the arrow of the bow across a steep wall with feet in a break but almost nothing to hold on to, in a very exposed position above a concave slab sweeping several hundred feet down to the foot of the crag.  It looked quite alarming with the last runners some way below, but I had some inside knowledge from reading up Cloggy history in my well-thumbed copy of The Black Cliff (long out of print – I saw a copy advertised for £165 recently).  After Edwards’ first ascent in 1941 the route was not repeated for seven years, in spite of a number of attempts by the leading climbers of the day, and the eventual second ascent turned into something of an epic.  Protected by a runner at the start, the leader had climbed the crux but the second declined to follow and so they continued to the top with one man on Bow and the other on Great, connected by 200 feet of hemp line.

Almost 60 years later, I reflected that they only had one sort of runner in 1948 and sure enough, a brief search revealed a small spike above the start of the traverse.  A tape runner on the spike and suddenly everything seemed much more friendly.  It’s easy to be bold with a runner above your head and I got across without too much trouble, but when Carolyn came to follow the look of horror on her face was a sight to behold, as a fall from the traverse would have led to an impressive pendulum.  But I had a cunning plan.  By leaving a back rope on the small spike we could make the traverse quite safe with a runner at both ends, and flick the runner off after Carolyn had crossed.

After the excitement of the crux the rest of the climb is just pure pleasure – a long pitch up the middle of the slab and a surprisingly simple exit through the bulge at the very tip of the bow into easy climbing and sunshine at the top of the crag. 

Carolyn on the final easy pitch of Bow Shaped  Slab

That was a day to remember, but there was still another climb to do and a few weeks later we were heading for a rendezvous with the Old Man of Stoer, a 200 foot sea stack on the North West coast of Scotland near Lochinver.  You first see the Old Man from about half a mile away and very impressive he looks, for his landward face is dead vertical apart from an overhang at half height, and the seaward side bulges with a substantial beer belly.  You can see why the 1950s guide book described him as ‘evidently quite unclimbable’.  It was Tom Patey who showed the way, finding a route to the summit in 1966 at a modest VS standard and writing an account in his book ‘One Man’s Mountains’ (which you can buy for £6.99 rather than £165).

Our first view of the Old Man of Stoer

A sea stack has to be surrounded by sea.  In case this seems like a statement of the bleedin’ obvious, the most famous British ‘sea stack’, the Old Man’s big brother in Orkney, does not qualify, and if you are in a pedantic mood the Old Man of Hoy is a mere foreshore pinnacle.  Anyway, the Old Man of Stoer is a proper sea stack, as a channel of deep water, about 20 feet wide, separates him from the foreshore.  In spite of his enthusiasm for sea stack climbing Patey was a non-swimmer and on the first ascent his team brought two ladders to cross the channel, but the usual plan nowadays is to get the most gullible member of the team to swim the channel and fix a rope for a tyrolean traverse.  As it was my idea to come here I had volunteered for the swim, though with no great enthusiasm as a brief paddle on the beach by the campsite had shown that the sea temperature in these parts was rather colder than what I was used to on the Dorset coast.

But salvation was at hand, for when we reached the cliff top opposite the Old Man we could see that there was already a rope in place for the tyrolean and two other climbers were going down to test it.  There was more good news, as the Old Man seemed to be free of the vicious fulmars that nest in early summer, ready to repel invading climbers by vomiting over them with a foul-smelling orange slime.

Two old men

We scrambled gingerly down steep grass and rock to the base of the cliff.  Carolyn seemed to find this hard going but she got no sympathy from me.  I pointed out that Patey’s team had descended this same slope with ladders balanced round their necks, where ‘the penalty for a slip was instant decapitation’.

Tyrolean traverse to the Old Man

In spite of my best efforts to tension it, the tyrolean rope sagged alarmingly under my weight, but it kept me just above the water and we crossed without getting wet.  From here the stack rears up, impossibly vertical, so the route sneaks off leftwards, traversing a steep wall on flat holds and slippery hand-jams.  Halfway across the footholds disappeared, causing me a slight panic until I could stuff a Friend into the crack in front of my nose; this is the hardest part of the climb.  As I reached the end of the traverse I was startled by a bird which shot out from under my feet - not a fulmar but a black guillemot, a common bird on this coast, which dived and gave me a great view of its elegant underwater swimming technique in the clear water below.

The first (and hardest) pitch on the Old Man. The route traverses left to the big ledge.

From the end of the traverse, upward progress is more feasible, and three more pitches take you to the top.  As well as leading to a spectacular summit, it’s a superb climb in its own right, continuously interesting and varied on perfect rough Torridonian sandstone, with some nifty route finding to find the easiest line and huge exposure on the top pitch.  After lounging around for a while on the surprisingly spacious summit the next problem was to get down, and although the abseil anchors are well below the top, I had read somewhere that 50 metre ropes will only just reach the ground on rope stretch.  As the last half of the abseil is completely free, this must give an interesting descent, hanging in space and wondering if the ropes will reach the ground.  Fortunately we were spared this excitement as we had now caught up the pair in front and they kindly allowed us to use their 60 metre ropes, so that the descent and return to shore were straightforward.

The clouds dispersed to give a sublime evening.  We pottered on the beach at Clachnessie to find samples of Lewissian Gneiss for the Lyness geological museum, celebrated with dinner and a few beers in a harbourside pub in Lochinver where the sun was so strong that they had to draw the blinds, then wandered up above the campsite to get a phone signal and to marvel at the panorama - across the sea to the Western Isles and inland to the extraordinary profile of Suilven, lit up in the evening sun.  A bank of cloud in the west heralded the end of the good weather, but we could hardly complain after such a wonderful day.

The view from near the campsite at Achmelvich

So which route was the best?  You can never be sure, as there are always plenty of new climbs to do.  On the way back south we stopped off in Glencoe and enjoyed a grand day on the Etive Slabs, when the sun was strong enough to keep the midges away and Carolyn thought that Spartan Slab was the best route of the summer.  As for me, I reckon that Cloggy takes some beating but I’ll reserve judgement until I have made the four hour walk in to the heart of the Great Wilderness and climbed Fionn Buttress on Carnmore Crag.