Beghan Bouldering

To Fleswick Bay on a warm winter's afternoon, V & I for the sheer exercise and pleasure, Younger Step-Daughter with her box of water-colours to try to capture the light. For those who don't know it, Fleswick Bay is the great secret of the Cumbrian coast, a sharp declivity between the sandstone stacks of the north and south St Bees Head, where a tiny stream trickles into the sea. Only accessible on foot by the coastal path, its cliffs are the haunt of seabird colonies, its sands the legendary resting place of gemstone fragments. A famous holiday jaunt for face-workers from Haig Pit and the Marchon anhydrite workings, whose shafts and levels pass far beneath it, the Bay has the feel of both a refuge and an exposed speck of wilderness caught between the mayhem of the Irish Sea and the monumental geology of the sandstone cliffs. It was also a favourite expedition for schoolterm Sundays when the boredom of boarding at the nearby school drove teenage lassitude into the urge for intrepid scrambling. We arrived to find Fleswick transformed: a broad sandstone pavement, perhaps unseen for centuries, had been exposed, the gem-bearing sands being carried away massively by the storms of winter. Just how catastrophic this change in the landscape had been only became obvious when a solitary wanderer arrived, bearing what looked like a cross between a gymn-mat and an orthopaedic cushion. He laid down his load, looked up to the cliffs, scratched his head, and consulted a lavishly illustrated booklet. Then he came over and asked us - was this Fleswick Bay? Yes, we assured him, this was. He pointed to photographs of the cliffs, which clearly suggested otherwise. The source of his confusion soon became apparent. He was a boulderer,and this was his first expedition to the route-rich cliffs of the Bay. For those unfamiliar with it, bouldering is a kind of semi-domesticated offspring of mountaineering and gymnastics, a smallscale but hugely demanding variation that values dexterity and intensity over exposure, altitude or inaccessibility. I was pleasantly surprised to find from his book that the sites of teenage free-scrambling (which on at least one occasion almost ended very badly indeed) were now themselves formalised into named routes, starred ticklists and recommended starting points. Except they no longer were. Nature had rendered our boulderer's guidebook obsolete. Each route now began in mid-air, a good 6 feet above the sandstone pavement - the forgiving sands upon which they had once begun having gone with the storm-tides of winter. Every route now had not only a new start of extreme difficulty, but a distinctly uncushioned decking-out below. Our boulderer went off to study further some of the lines and then announced that there would, after all, be no Beghan bouldering that day, a choice which I silently aplauded. On reflection, the addition of those feet of bare rock at the bottom of the cliffs could be said to alter the nature of most of the routes substantially, so I would imagine that enthusiasts are already forming orderly queues to claim fresh first ascents . . .