Ilkley – A challenging Yorkshire crag and quarry

My brother David and I had planned to go to Scotland and climb Tower Ridge on Ben Nevis this weekend. Unfortunately, the Met Office told us that the weather was set to be pretty poor.

We sat down and looked for a crag that we could climb in Yorkshire which has routes 20m and over. David has a book by ROCKFAX called Northern England, in which we found the perfect candidate, Ilkley.

Ilkley quarry is  opposite a pub called the Cow and Calf in Ilkley, Yorkshire. There’s a big car park and the crag is clearly visible from the road. The routes are steep and vary from V Diff right up to E8. We only climbed the quarry area, opposite the car park because we wanted to do 2 Yorkshire crags in one day.

My first impression as I walked up to the crag was that it looked tall, steep (good so far) and green (not so good).

We pulled out the guide book and elected to start with a route called Fairy Steps, HD, which I lead. We then went on to climb a fluttery VS called Napoleon, lead by my intrepid younger sibling. My route went pretty much without incident. David’s was an altogether different tale including swearing, about an hour of our lives disappearing and then a pretty respectable fall from the top section!

I’ll go into more detail about the actual climbs later.

I don’t feel like I can give you a full review of Ilkley because we only managed 2 climbs. However, I will say this: if you like crags that are busy, full of spectators, green, and have polished rock then you’ll enjoy Ikley. If these kind of things affect your performance then get ready for an ego battering.

Apologies to all of you that love this crag, I do intend to return and try again.

The picture, top-right is by Alh1, check out his FlickR stream