Fairhead

‘Fairhead has the greatest expanse of climbable rock in the UK.’  Not many people know that, as Fairhead lies on the north east coast of Northern Ireland, away from the mainstream of British climbing, and sees few visitors from this side of the Irish Sea.  In fact it is one of only three major crags in the world where Steve Newman hasn’t climbed.

It wasn’t too hard to persuade a few other veterans that a visit was overdue, and so Steve, Stewart Walker, Paul Rigg and I booked flights and accommodation for a week in June.  A morning flight from Southampton to Belfast’s George Best airport was about as painless as air travel can be these days, and after a short drive we were having lunch in a café in the seaside town of Ballycastle with a view of the crag from the front door.

It was a rather damp day, but ‘time spent on reconnaissance is seldom wasted’, according to the Major, so we went to have a look at the crag.  The approach past farms and over rolling moorland takes you to the top of the cliff and gives no hint of what lies beyond.  It’s a crag by the sea rather than a sea cliff, as the base of the crag is about 100 metres above the sea on top of a steep slope of man-eating boulders, with a superb outlook over the Antrim coast, the small island of Rathlin and across to Scotland where the Mull of Kintyre is surprisingly close and the islands of Islay and Jura provide a distant backdrop.

We wandered along the rim, stopping occasionally to peer rather gingerly over the top, then scrambled down a gully to view the crag from below. Wow!  This was certainly like nothing we had seen before, over two miles long and up to a hundred metres high, gloomy, north facing and formidably steep.  If this is the greatest expanse of climbable rock in the UK, then your definition of ‘climbable’ must include the ability to lead E5.

Fortunately for us lesser mortals, the western end of the crag is more friendly, with routes from 30 to 70 metres, easy access, afternoon sunshine and a shed load of classics from VS to E1 on the Prow and around the Ballycastle descent gully. It may be ‘Fairhead lite’ compared with the sterner stuff on the central section of the crag (you’ll have to ask Scott about that), but it still provided us with several days of superb climbing.

Next morning we were back to try our luck on the Prow and the obvious place to start was The Black Thief, a single pitch VS and the easiest route in the graded list.  It was a bit of a shock to find that this was no mild VS stroll but 30 metres of continuously steep 4c climbing, like three gritstone VSs on top of one another.  Next came The Fence, improbably steep and described in the guide as ‘a VS that thinks it’s an HVS’.  We thought so too.

Those two routes showed us what Fairhead climbing is all about. The grades are tough and the climbs are steep and remarkably sustained, but the rock is impeccable and runners can be placed almost at will.

After lunch Paul and I did Girona, a wonderful VS with a spectacular top pitch, stepping off a pinnacle for some very exposed mantelshelf moves, and then returned to the top of the Prow where Steve and Stewart were completing Fireball (E1).  They seemed to have found this good value, although Stewart appeared to have had more trouble getting the gear out than climbing the route.  We counted the runners – 18 in a 35 metre pitch.  Fairhead climbing is described as having ‘gear on demand’, and it seemed that Steve was out to prove it.

Steve and Stewart on Girona

After that day the Major was unfortunately jinxed by the World Cup injury curse and was hors-de-combat, so with a team of three a change of tactics was called for.  Steve decided that he would go first on the E1s, and that Stewart and I would have to lead on anything easier.  We didn’t dare to argue.

The new plan was soon put to the test on the classic HVS of the crag, Hell’s Kitchen. (Nothing to do with reality TV, this is one of the earliest routes at Fairhead, first climbed in the early1970s when Gordon Ramsay was still in nappies).  It follows a huge open- book corner with two long 5a pitches, rising for over 60 metres to a very steep finale.  Stewart led us up the first pitch, with some tough moves on the left wall to get into the corner proper, and then I was sent up the top pitch, weighed down with enough gear to open a shop and determined to use most of it.

At first things went quite smoothly; the runners slotted in with gratifying regularity and as the corner steepened I was able to stay in balance by following the instructions from below to ‘do that crazy stemming, man!’ until just below the top, bridged out in a wild position below a bulge, I contemplated a precarious step up at exactly the point where the crack went blind and the runners were well below my feet rather than above my head.  So much for gear on demand.

It seemed obvious what to do – bridge out with the right foot on a tiny smear, move the left foot up onto a good hold above the bulge and stretch up to reach a pocket, but every time I tried it I could feel my foot slip on the lichenous rock and the hand holds were poor crimps that did not feel very secure. While I procrastinated the other two were passing the time by calling the odds on the outcome. After a quarter of an hour we had

            Retreat             6 to 4 on favourite

            Success            2 to 1

            Leader fall        10 to 1

and the substitute was warming up, but then I tried a different tactic, making a high step up without using the smear. It worked!  I grabbed the pocket and quickly slotted in yet another runner in to restore equilibrium. A few VS moves later and I was on top in the sunshine.  The others soon joined me and after enjoying the buzz following a great route we sorted the gear.  19 runners and a new record.

Steve, Stewart and me after Hells Kitchen

But Steve doesn’t know the meaning of defeat. We moved over to the Prow in the afternoon sunshine and Steve set off up Midnight Cruiser (E1), yet another 3 star route.  I was hanging on a rope taking photos but I couldn’t help noticing that it was not exactly a cruise and a lot of gear was being placed.  This was another tremendous route, almost 40 metres of steep and sustained climbing where virtually every move was 5a or 5b, with the crux right at the top.  After Stewart and I had been dragged up we counted the runners - 21!  Steve had his record back and we could go home happy.

Steve on Midnight Cruiser

The 21 runners Steve used on Midnight Cruiser

As well as the climbing I thoroughly enjoyed my first visit to Northern Ireland.  The coastal scenery was spectacular, the locals were very friendly and we enjoyed a rest day visiting Derry and sampling the wares at the nearby Bushmills distillery.  If you fancy a visit to Fairhead then find a tame E1 leader, keep doing the pull-ups, buy lots of cams and have a look at the excellent website www.fairheadclimbers.com where you will find both inspiration and plenty of useful advice.

Old Wrecks Day Out

Although I have been climbing in the South West for over twenty years, until recently I had never sampled the esoteric delights of the Culm Coast - the cliffs on the North coast of Devon and Cornwall around Hartland Point and Bude where the rock is metamorphosed shale. Climbing on shale had always seemed only suitable for masochists with small brains and large life assurance policies, but after my first visit I was pleasantly surprised, so perhaps this article might encourage others to go and see for themselves.

For those who judge a route’s quality in terms of its death potential, the guidebook features plenty of horrendous sounding extremes (mostly courtesy of Mick Fowler), but for ordinary mortals the obvious place to start is Wrecker's Slab, a 400 foot VS on Cornakey Cliff which now seems to be recognised as the best of the easier shale routes and is described in the guide as ‘a Culm classic which should not be missed by those who still possess the spirit of adventure’.  A further attraction, if you are interested in the history of the sport, is that the first ascent was made by the legendary Scottish climber, Tom Patey.

When I first started climbing in the early seventies, Patey was something of an icon to the group I climbed with, not because we had ever met him or even tried any of his routes, but because we were captivated by his book One Man's Mountains which was a constant source of inspiration and amusement.  The book is a collection of Patey's writing, published after his death in an abseiling accident in 1970, and is a mixture of satire (a sort of mountaineering Private Eye), conventional narratives and songs. I read most of the book again recently, looking to compare experiences after an unsavoury encounter with a puking fulmar, and while the satirical pieces seem rather dated after almost thirty years, the narrative articles are as fresh and entertaining as ever. Well worth a read if you can get hold of a copy.

Although most of Patey's climbing was in Scotland, he spent some time on National Service in Devon with the Royal Marines, and his most significant contributions to South West climbing were the first big routes on the Culm Coast - Wrecker's Slab and its neighbour Smuggler's Slab. For the first ascent of these routes in 1959 he was joined by two other distinguished nautical mountaineers - Zeke Deacon was the leading climber from the Commando climbing instructors, pioneer of many Cornish classics such as Bishop's Rib, and Keith Lawder was a retired Admiral whose finest hour was to come two years later when he led the first ascent of the Devil's Slide on Lundy at the age of 68.

I had been meaning to try Wrecker's for some time, but attempts to persuade various Wessex luminaries to join me had proved unsuccessful. Then having spent the previous weekend risking the curse of Viveash by plodding up a few Munros in the North of Scotland, it seemed time to do some proper climbing, so I recruited an unsuspecting Chris Bristow and we drove down from Weymouth on a perfect summer morning. The guide book instructed us to drive down a private track to a nearby farm, park in the yard, and ask the farmer's permission to walk across his land to the coast path. Much to my surprise, the farmer seemed perfectly happy with this arrangement and cheerfully showed us the way to the crag, situated in a perfect setting on an unspoiled and spectacular stretch of coastline.

As we sorted out our gear, it appeared that Chris had come equipped to re-create the conditions of the first ascent, as he produced his collection of ancient heavyweight steel karabiners. He was reluctantly persuaded to leave them behind, apart from an extra large screw-gate needed to anchor the tangle of faded tape which forms the Bristow patent full body harness. I have heard some people doubt the security of this arrangement, but I should point out that I was holding the other end of the rope when it was successfully field tested at the Dewerstone last year. Indeed, a small patch on the backside of Chris's shorts bore evidence to the minor collateral damage which was suffered during this test.

My first visit to a sea cliff usually involves a major epic to locate the way down, but for once there was no problem as an obvious path and a short scramble led down to sea level. (In fact the epic came later in the day when we tried to descend to the nearby Gull Rock over terrain that had the consistency and stability of a pile of corn flakes, but that's another story.) The crag is a collection of enormous overlapping slabs above a beach of smooth pebbles, and Wrecker's follows the largest slab, rising straight from the beach to the cliff top for over four hundred feet.

We roped up while Chris muttered about assorted injuries which he had acquired during dangerous pastimes such as DIY and badminton. I interpreted this as a suggestion that I should lead, so I set off up an awkward step off the beach, followed by seventy feet of simple slab climbing when the first runner conveniently appeared to protect a more tricky section to a stance in a grassy groove. The next pitch was supposed to be the crux and looked more challenging, as the slab steepened into an overlap that had to be circumvented by a shallow groove of shattered rock whose stability looked questionable. In fact it was much easier than it looked, for the technical grade was only Severe and although the groove contained a few throwaway holds, it was just as solid as the Ruckle at Swanage and about thirty degrees further from the vertical. There were even some good runners, with a wonderfully reassuring Friend placement to protect a long stride out of the groove and back onto the slab above the overlap. The rest of the pitch was pure joy; no protection for sixty feet, just perfectly easy slab climbing on sound rock with huge exposure, ending at a tiny ledge, belayed hopefully to a couple of in-situ pegs in the middle of the vast sweep of slab.

Chris led through on the next pitch - more slab climbing followed by a short steep crack that gave painful toe jams and a chance to stretch the arm muscles. Another long easy pitch, taken slowly to savour the exposure, and we could relax at the top of the cliff. Our first reaction was that the route had proved much easier and less serious than the guide book would suggest, for now that most of the loose rock has been removed, the VS grade is exceedingly generous. Not that this matters, for the route's attraction lies not in the difficulty of the climbing, but in other less tangible qualities - the sense of adventure on a big sea cliff, the enormous exposure in the upper part of the climb, the wonderful location, and the chance to follow in the footsteps of one of the great pioneers of British climbing.

Incidentally there are a couple of other Patey classics near the top of my wish-list, but the logistics of climbing them may prove more difficult. The Old Man of Stoer (VS) is a spectacular sea stack on the coast of North West Scotland near Lochinver, and Squareface is a V. Diff in the Garbh Coire of Beinn a Bhuird, one of the remotest parts of the Cairngorms, a mere ten miles from the nearest road. Anyone interested out there?