Crags: Filey Brigg – Scary but a nice change

Being a nine to five (well 7:30 – 5:30 if I’m being honest) office slave, I get extremely frustrated with the whole British summer weather cycle of beautiful sunshine all week and rain all weekend. To make the situation even worse, David, my brother and regular climbing partner, works Saturdays. This means that we have effectively only got Sundays to play out, unless we book well in advance.

With the advent of the lighter, summer evenings I suggested that rather than climb indoors at Rock City in Hull, we try to get to a crag and climb outdoors. The only problem being is that it takes around an hour and a half to get to Hathersage from my place, which means we need to be away early to get a decent climb.

Last Friday I suggested we head of early and have a go up at Lawrencefield or Millstone. Unfortunately David couldn’t get away early. The earliest he could make it would have got us there for around 7:30pm – not worth it! As David is only about 3 miles from Filey, I suggested that we climb at Filey Brigg.

We have climbed at Filey before so it wasn’t a first for us. If you haven’t climbed there before and you’re thinking of trying it, I’ll warn you now – be prepared to bleed!

The rock at Filey is very, very sharp. This makes for nice positive holds (definitely no slopers), but if you slip, brush a bare arm or leg against the rock, you will spill some claret! I felt that I climbed OK, but when I got home and looked in the mirror, the man staring back at me looked like he had been mauled by a cougar. The other thing to note about the rock is that it can be quite brittle in places, think twice before swinging on that fossilised tree root!

There’s a reasonable selection of routes, mainly sport graded though there are trad routes too. They’re all very old, so be careful they may have changed since they were written into a guidebook. Some of the sport routes are bolted, but most of the ones we looked at looked really dangerous (significant chance of hitting the ground, even after the second clip).

None of the climbs are that tall. Most of the ones we have climbed have an easy start, a challenging sequence of 2 -3 moves in the middle then an easy finish.

Is it worth the trip?

Well it certainly makes a nice change from climbing indoors. Climbing on sharp rock where falls might yield catastrophic consequences (or at least a heavy dose of pain) adds an air of excitement. I have climbed there 3 times now, so I suppose that has to say something, though it is my nearest crag.

I always enjoy climbing at Filey, just because it’s quite different. I always end up climbing well within my limits (no harder than severe), but it’s nice to move around on a different type of rock (a mixture of limestone to sandstone), and the waves crashing below add a real ambiance.

If you do go, download a guidebook and be very careful.