In Quarries.
Scrambling in home quarries, on chalk, gravel, blue-stone,—all kinds of rock,—is excellent practice. The surfaces are, however, raw and untempered by time, and the crude fractures and ledges by which we climb are made by man and survive by no natural law of the fittest. No experience of rock structure can therefore suffice to allow of calculation upon their security. Each hold must be separately tested before use. The risk is generally out of all proportion to the height. A rope from above should be used on any passage of doubt.
Along Sea Cliffs.
Sea cliffs have many votaries. It is perhaps ungrateful to class them as unusual rock, but their unfamiliar conditions, their wave-polished and often undercut bases, their summits artificially sculptured and constantly strained and fractured afresh by the fall of the cliff below, exclude them from a normal category. Their charm lies in their variety of rock, revealed in forms pensive, brooding, surprised, jovial or defiant, upon headland, island and stack. There are few more exhilarating scrambles than the granite outcrops of Cornwall, set in green seas, surf-spray and sunlight. The upper end of the coast of Sutherlandshire alone provides eight or nine different varieties of rock, and therefore of ascents. The whole island of Sark can be circumambulated at about the mid-height of its cliffs.
Traverses are the peculiar property of sea cliffs, which are often awkward or impossible of approach from their base for more direct ascent. Whole days, in fact if it were desirable a whole holiday lifetime of delightfully varied traversing at different levels may be had along the cliffs, high or low, of the west coasts of Scotland and of its islands, of Ireland, of England, and of parts of Wales. The north coast of Ireland has attractive sections alternating in this instance with pinnacles and scarps of decadent blends. Usually the return from such traverses can be made in the evening up a gully, by which we resume, if we wish, on the morrow. As a last resource in difficulties there is always the sea for a header of escape.
Rubber soles are the best wear; or, for some varieties, raw soft hide with the hair on, as worn in the west of Ireland; but rubber is, of course, treacherous on wet or weedy tidal rocks. This fact should be remembered in our stimulating races with the waves for the foot of a promising crack.
During the novitiate even hardy heads must beware of the intimidating, often vertiginous, effect produced by the constant movement of water below the feet. Both the sound and the motion are found to react almost unconsciously upon toughened climbing nerves.
The cliffs of the east coast of England consist too often of subsiding clay and water, or of a hard pebbly conglomerate; but they provide at least unusual climbing.
A good earth glissade can occasionally be found down their rifts; and every section affords opportunity for a cautious scramble or an ingenious trick route. On the harder earth and pebble mixtures there is sometimes occasion for step-cutting practice. The cliff edges frequently overhang, and present all the dangers of unseen cornices if approached from above, and more than their difficulties if reached from below.
Boots are best on these east cliffs. Vertigo is unknown, since the waves are all too rarely in close proximity to the cliffs!