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!