Climbing
Fair Head is widely regarded as Ireland's finest climbing crag, but for a variety of reasons including its relatively remote location and the physical strength and unfamiliar climbing techniques often required there, does not attract the volume of climbers that one might expect at a crag of such quality. Its cliffs stretch for a distance of over 5 km around the headland, rising to a maximum height of over 100m. They are not sea-cliffs, but have been described as a mountain crag by the sea, since they tower above an extensive boulder field and their isolation and size gives climbing there a big-wall mountaineering feel.
The cliffs are composed of dolerite, giving a mixture of steep cracked walls, corners, and, in many places, sets of columns reminiscent of organ-pipes. The dolerite sits on top of a bed of chalk which is visible in places.
The cliffs abound in well-protected steep crack climbing, between one and four pitches long. Many of the cracks involve hand-jamming, so some climbers tape their hands to protect the skin from what they term "Fair Head rash". Other climbs involve off-width or full-width chimneying, which is not often encountered in other Irish crags. As with nearly all Irish crags, only traditional protection ("clean climbing") is used.
The current guidebook, published in 2002, lists about 400 routes from under grade VS 4c up to E6 6b, but more recent climbing includes routes up to E8 6c.
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Famous quotes containing the word climbing:
“An old, mad man still climbing in his ghost,
My fathers’ ghost is climbing in the rain.”
—Dylan Thomas (1914–1953)
“... climbing the primordial climb,
a dream within a dream,
then sitting here
holding a basket of fire.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“There is, however, this consolation to the most way-worn traveler, upon the dustiest road, that the path his feet describe is so perfectly symbolical of human life,—now climbing the hills, now descending into the vales. From the summits he beholds the heavens and the horizon, from the vales he looks up to the heights again. He is treading his old lessons still, and though he may be very weary and travel-worn, it is yet sincere experience.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)