Tuesday 28th of September to Friday 31st of September
I sometimes think there are two kinds of British climber: those who have climbed on Lundy, and those who have not. Before you go, the island has an almost mythical quality. It sits somewhere out in the Bristol Channel, appearing in guidebooks and climbing stories as a place of huge granite sea cliffs, committing abseils and famous routes. You know it exists, of course, but it does not quite feel like an ordinary climbing destination. Nearly thirty years later, I can still remember arriving there for the first time.
But the story really begins at two o’clock in the morning, with two absurdly determined young climbers loading an Astra and setting off on the sort of adventure that makes perfect sense when you are young enough not to think too carefully about what you are getting yourself into.
It was September 1999, and Will and I had already been climbing together long enough to trust one another. The invitation had come from my friend Steve Martin, known to us as Waspie, who had been part of my climbing life for years. I had first known him through a Stancliffe Hall School trip to Rum when I was a child. Now he was heading to Lundy with another friend, also called Steve. The two Steves had their own climbing plans, so if I wanted to come I needed to bring a partner of my own, preferably somebody comfortable operating around VS and HVS. We also needed an abseil rope.
Will was the obvious choice. By then we had spent enough days on rock together for me to know something important about him. When things became genuinely difficult, when you could not see your partner, could not hear much over the wind or the sea, and simply had to trust that somebody out of sight was doing the right thing, there were very few people I would rather have been tied to. Will was one of them.
We set off at two in the morning and drove south to Bideford with such enthusiasm that we arrived about two hours early for the boat. After a short sleep we boarded the MS Oldenburg for the crossing. The Bristol Channel was experiencing what was officially described as a “moderate” swell. Moderate, we discovered, is a relative term. Will only just managed to retain his breakfast. Other passengers were less fortunate.
Eventually Lundy appeared ahead of us, rising out of the channel. We landed, carried our gear up to the campsite, pitched the tents in the lee of the shower block and did the obvious thing. We went climbing.
Our first objective was Devil’s Slide. It was something we all wanted to climb, but it also had one very practical advantage: it was easy to find. Cloud had already begun closing in around the island and visibility was deteriorating. On Lundy, where simply locating the correct cliff can be part of the day’s adventure, that suddenly mattered.
We abseiled down just as a light drizzle started. Devil’s Slide is extraordinary, an enormous sweep of granite roughly 200 feet high, sloping down towards the sea. The classic Devil’s Slide route, graded HS, takes the right-hand side. Protection was sparse enough that you had to look for it, but the angle was friendly and the granite gave surprisingly good friction even as the rock became damp.
We climbed it and headed back towards the campsite. Then the rain started properly. By the time we reached the tents we were soaked, and our first evening on Lundy became an exercise in trying to dry ourselves and our equipment while the weather battered the island outside.
There was something rather wonderful about that. We were properly there now. There was no quick retreat to the car, no drive to another crag and no easy change of plan. We had the island, the climbing and whatever weather the Bristol Channel decided to throw at us.
By the following morning we had dried out, at least to some extent. The rain had stopped, although the wind remained, and we headed across to Landing Craft Bay. With the tide high, we chose Scrabble, an HVS set back from the sea.
The first two pitches were around 4c and reasonably straightforward, although the second contained an unprotected traverse for the second. That second was me, and I was not especially delighted by it. At the end of the pitch was the sort of belay that immediately reminds you that you are sea-cliff climbing: rusty pegs, wires and ageing pieces of tat, the miscellaneous collection from which generations of apparently braver climbers had been willing to abseil.
Then came the third pitch. This was the crux, a 5b traverse following a thin, rounded break. Will led it. He managed to place a couple of cams before committing himself to the traverse. Somewhere halfway across, according to the guidebook, there was a good fingertip hold, followed by the memorable instruction to “bicycle wildly” across the wall.
I watched Will work his way out across it and then disappear around the corner. After that, there was mostly the sea.
Anyone who has climbed on a sea cliff knows how quickly normal communication can become meaningless. The wind takes your voice, waves crash below, and once your partner disappears from sight you become dependent on a much simpler language. The rope tightens. The rope moves. Perhaps there are a few deliberate pulls, or perhaps it is simply rope drag. You wait and try to interpret it.
Eventually it was my turn to climb. As the second, I moved towards each piece of Will’s protection and removed it as I went. That was when the consequences of the traverse became very concrete. Below me was an overhang or lip. If I fell after removing the protection, there was a real possibility that I would end up hanging in space beneath it, unable to regain the rock and with almost no prospect of communicating properly with Will above. I would have to sort myself out.
Perhaps I would have. Perhaps I would not. But there is a curious point in climbing when thinking about all the possibilities stops being useful. Eventually there is only the rock. You feel its texture, look at your feet and search for the next hold.
Will had been right about the fingertip hold. It was there, small, positive and utterly real. The ridiculous bicycling movement worked because, however absurd it sounded when written in a guidebook, it actually did work. Then I was through it.
I climbed on until eventually I reached Will, secure at the belay and holding my ropes. Of everything we climbed on Lundy, that is the moment that has remained clearest. Partly it was because the climbing was difficult for me. At that stage in my life, 5b on real rock was close to the upper end of what I was climbing, and doing it above the sea gave everything an additional edge. But the thing I remember most clearly is the trust.
Until then, saying that I trusted Will had been an idea. On Scrabble it became something physical. He had disappeared from view. I could not speak to him. I could not see his belay. I simply had to believe that the protection had been good, that he had built something secure above and that, when I climbed through the difficult ground, there really would be somebody solidly attached to the other end of those ropes.
There was. The system worked, the climbing worked, and Will was there.
Later that day we started Eclipse, a three-star arête graded VS. This time I led the first pitch, with Will belaying below. That placed him perfectly for Lundy to remind us that the sea was never merely scenery.
A large wave somehow surged in behind him, cleared an enormous boulder, perhaps thirty feet high, and completely drenched him. I missed the worst of it because I was already above, climbing. When Will eventually reached the belay, the weather decided that one soaking was not sufficient and the heavens opened. Now both of us were wet.
The upper pitch, with water running down it, became increasingly unattractive. There is a point at which determination ceases to be admirable and simply becomes stubbornness, and neither of us felt any need to discover where that point lay. Instead we escaped via The Black Hand, a VS 4c.
Oddly, despite being technically a little harder, it felt far less intimidating. There were big positive holds, plenty to work with even in the wet, and the sort of climbing where you could relax sufficiently to remember to breathe. That was Lundy in miniature. The numerical grade told you only part of the story.
Then there was our rope. We had brought a 50-metre retired dynamic rope from the university club stores, the sort of rope that had already enjoyed a substantial career before being demoted from normal climbing duties.
For abseiling it worked. What made it memorable was the stretch. A long dynamic rope has an impressive capacity for bounce. You could descend what felt like an enormous distance, finally reach the bottom, unweight it and then watch metres of rope spring back upwards as though it had suddenly remembered somewhere else it was supposed to be.
It was not that we did not know how to abseil. We were experienced enough to build the systems and manage the descents. But safe and comfortable are not always the same thing. On Lundy, where abseiling into a route often amounted to committing yourself to climbing back out, watching your rope leap back towards the cliff concentrated the mind wonderfully.
One route required two abseils. For the second, we used our climbing ropes and pulled them down behind us. Once they were gone, there was no rope leading back to the top. You were down. Now you climbed out.
That commitment was one of the things that made Lundy feel so different from ordinary cragging.
During the day the two Steves went their way and Will and I went ours. They had climbed together for years and had their own partnership, their own rhythm and their own list of routes. We would disappear in different directions across the island and reconvene in the evening.
The natural meeting place was the Marisco Tavern. We would gather there, get a drink, compare adventures and inspect the climbing logbook. Sea-cliff climbing is not necessarily a particularly social activity while you are doing it. On a big route, your world becomes very small: your partner, the ropes, the gear, the next move, the weather and the sea somewhere below. The sociability comes afterwards. At the Marisco, everybody’s separate little climbing worlds came back together.
Each evening there was also another useful piece of information waiting for us. The boat was cancelled. Then it was cancelled again. And again. The weather in the Bristol Channel had apparently decided that the ferry timetable was merely advisory.
I remember wondering, without being particularly alarmed, how exactly we were eventually going to leave the island. We had not paid the additional fee that supposedly covered evacuation by helicopter. It seemed the sort of problem that would somehow resolve itself. When you are twenty-one, quite a lot of problems seem like that.
For our last proper day’s climbing we returned to Devil’s Slide, this time for Albion, the classic VS corner running to the left of the slab. The crack was slightly damp and the wind properly blustery, but the climbing was excellent. It was one of those routes where the three stars in the guidebook immediately made sense.
I had hoped we might attempt one of the famous E1s running up the centre of the slab, but the wind removed any temptation to force the issue. Maybe next time, we thought.
We also investigated Devil’s Chimney, a 150-foot sea stack, but the bottom was wet and we could not identify the supposedly straightforward way of reaching the start. Eventually we abandoned it and returned instead to Landing Craft Bay for Formula One.
The Marisco logbook had given us the impression that virtually everyone who came to Lundy climbed Formula One, along with Devil’s Slide and Albion. Once on it, we understood why. Around 135 feet of sustained HVS 5a, it follows a corner towards a roof, pulls around onto the wall and continues through flakes and cracks.
It had everything: jamming, bridging, laybacking, abundant protection and plenty of exposure. It was sustained without becoming unpleasant, the sort of route that keeps presenting interesting climbing and seems to go on for exactly as long as you want it to. It felt like the perfect final climb.
By Friday, repeated ferry cancellations had finally answered the question of how we were leaving Lundy. We were not going by boat.
Instead, the island arranged for everybody to be flown back to the mainland by helicopter, particularly fortunate for those of us who had declined to pay the additional helicopter fee. I sat in the back. Any fantasy of riding beside the pilot belonged to Will.
What I remember is looking down as we left the island behind. There is a strange transformation when an adventure ends abruptly. One moment you are completely inside it: wet ropes, granite cliffs, wind, route-finding, tents, evenings in the Marisco and the constant presence of the sea. Then suddenly you are above it.
Lundy began to shrink beneath us. The cliffs that had seemed enormous became edges on a small island surrounded by a great deal of water. Everything we had done began, almost immediately, to turn into memory.
Of course, the adventure did not quite finish when the helicopter landed. Somewhere during the trip I had managed to lose my car keys.
The two Steves generously gave us a lift back to Warwick, while my father subsequently became involved in an additional expedition to recover the Astra using the spare keys from home. He made the sort of parental observation that lodges permanently in the memory: this was a one-time thing.
Fair enough.
What I could not have known then was how often Lundy itself would return.
Nearly thirty years later, when I am on the coast in Pembrokeshire, I still look for it. On a clear day there it is, a small shape sitting out in the Bristol Channel. Every time I see it, I am back on those cliffs.
I remember being close to the limit of what I could climb. I remember the sea below. I remember removing Will’s protection behind me on Scrabble and committing myself to that traverse. Most of all, I remember being unable to see or hear the person at the other end of the ropes and continuing anyway because I trusted that, when I reached the belay, he would be there.
He was.
I have never been back to Lundy. For years there was always the thought that perhaps I would return, to climb those E1s on Devil’s Slide, to find the way onto Devil’s Chimney, and to see what the island felt like with another decade or two of experience behind me.
I am no longer certain I need to.
Some places become complete in memory. Lundy is one of those places for me, a capsule of what climbing could feel like at one particular moment in my life, when I was good enough to be properly tested, experienced enough to cope with the situations we put ourselves into, and fortunate enough to be there with people I trusted.
Perhaps that is why the island still catches my attention whenever I see it from the mainland. It is not simply somewhere I once climbed. It has become a compass point in time, a small piece of rock sitting out in the Bristol Channel, marking who I was then and the climber I was becoming.