Northumbrian Climbing Guide

Pay your dues at the Cragside entrance and drive round the estate drive up to Cragend car park. Walk back to the little seating area which you passed on the way in, and follow a path into the wood. Follow the signed "Gun Walk", turning left soon after the signpost and zigzagging down the hill to the eastern end of the crag.

Cragend is the crag on the National Trust Cragside estate which can be seen just above the Weldon Bridge - Rothbury road. It is about 400 metres long and stands on a good path which runs from the Cragend quarry back towards Cragside House. Although the crag is on a wooded hillside, the recent clearance of rhododendrons has opened the aspect out a lot and the trees don't interfere with things much. The rock is excellent and clean in the bouldering regions and the landings are good. The crags and boulders underneath the path are extensive and certainly worth investigation. The Cragend car park is in a disused quarry which has some very nice looking walls in it which would give a lot of hard problems. The trouble is that it's all on NT land and they probably wouldn't take kindly to brushing and chalk, and worse still you have to pay for entry. If it wasn't for that it would be an excellent crag. There are lots of other outcrops on the estate, particularly a large promising looking one on the footpath between The Tarn and the adventure playground. This last one should be avoided as it is far too much in the public eye. The other outcrops are either part of the landscaping of the estate or have no realistic access through the rhododendrums.

Fell Sandstone Carboniferous, Dinantian
Excellent, hard and clean.

No recorded routes.