Callaly

Grid Ref: NU065092   Aspect: N   Routes: 11   Max Length: 10   Average Length: 8
Altitude: 275 mtrs   Walk in: 30 mins   Route quality: *

Park by a beech wood a few hundred metres east of Callaly. A path leads up through the woods, near the stone wall. Keep in the wood, avoiding the track which goes left onto forestry roads, and go over the top of the hill (Castle Hill), past a small quarry and down to a stile. There is a small sign for McArtneys cave just over the stile.

General

Callaly Crag is a collection of pinnacles and boulders in a wood on the hillside south of Callaly village. There are 13 routes from VD to E8 and good bouldering potential a few hundred metres west on a series of buttresses on the open hillside. This area is best approached from a signed footpath on the west side of Callaly.

Rock

Fell Sandstone Carboniferous, Dinantian

Routes/Bouldering:  

Routes

A few very good routes, but most of the buttresses are pretty chossy.

Problems

There is bouldering on the hillside west of the crag.

Other interesting stuff

A low white pinnacle sports "Macartney's Cave", a tiny retreat hewn out of the rock by a chaplain of that name from Callaly Castle. Near the top of the escarpment, just west of the woods, there is a huge boulder known as "Black Monday Rock", though the origin of the name has never been traced. The moor above the crag, now heavily forested has a wealth of medieval and post medieval remains. There are many bell pits which mined the coal seam which runs under the moor, a farmstead and some 12th century boundary stones which mark the northern extent of lands owned by Brinkburn Priory.

History

Routes have been done here by various groups from the 1950s. The hardest ones are the work of John & Andrew Earl and Ian Murray around about 1999. 6'6" Andy Cowley added two routes to Slab Buttress in April 2006.