On the abrasive magic of Peak District gritstone, A Dream of White Horses, and why British trad climbing has given me more than I realised or thought it would.

TRAD CLIMBING : THE ROACHES : GOGARTH : MENTAL HEALTH

---

Ask me where I feel most at home on rock, and I'll tell you in no time: The Roaches, on a crisp autumn morning, with the Staffordshire moorland stretching out below the crag and the gritstone doing that thing it does — rough as sandpaper, honest, demanding nothing except your complete and undivided attention. The Roaches feels like home to me.

I've climbed in enough places to know that gritstone is an acquired taste. It punishes the sloppy and rewards the committed. Its cracks take gear in ways that feel obvious at times but baffling at others. Its friction is either entirely with you or totally against you, and translates directly into your feet. But once it gets into your brain — once your body learns to trust that coarse, wind blasted surface — it becomes very difficult to think of anything else as the real thing.

The Roaches has a way of making you feel both very small and very specifically yourself. Not many places manage both at once.

What gritstone teaches you

What gritstone teaches, above all else, is decisiveness. The moves don't come easy. A mantel shelf on grit requires you to commit your weight fully at the exact right moment, and the rock will tell you immediately if you messed it up. In that sense it's the most honest climbing I know.

Over the years, The Roaches has become a place where I measure myself, not against other climbers or even against the grades, but against whoever I was the last time I stood at the base of a particular route. That special something— the holds, the crux, a different version of you — is something I haven't found anywhere else.

A Dream of White Horses

Gritstone is home, but it doesn't hold a monopoly on the routes that have meant so much to me. Some climbs exist in a separate part of my brain — the bit reserved for experiences that were so special as to change something in me forever. A Dream of White Horses, on the North Stack at Gogarth, is one of those.

First you commit and abseil all the way down to the sea, then you set off above the crashing sea. The route traverses the great zawn above you, following a line of improbable logic across the face with the sea heaving below. What makes it remarkable isn't the grade — it's the setting, the exposure, and the particular quality of commitment it demands. You are not simply climbing a route; you are moving, deliberately and irreversibly, across a wall that the sea built and continues to negotiate with. The rock beneath your hands is sharp, damp at times and tinged with the salt air. The sound from below is constant and enormous. The line ahead is beautiful and hard to navigate, in the way that the best trad routes always are.

I remember a moment on the final traverse pitch when I stopped — not from fear, but just to be in the moment— looking down at the water and rocks below thinking : wow this is what it's all about. Not the grade, not the tick, not any of it. Just this: being somewhere uniquely extraordinary, held there by your own decisions and a few pieces of gear in good rock, with nothing between you and the sea.

On the North Stack Wall, you feel like you're on the edge of the world itself — where the land runs out and the rock has been shaped by forces that have no interest in you whatsoever. That indifference and sense of insignificance is part of the point.

Silence and solitude

British trad climbing has taught me that different terrains offer different versions of the same essential thing. On gritstone, the silence is inward — the moor is wide and wind-scoured but the climbing pulls your attention so completely inward that your world narrows to the rock immediately in front of you. On a sea cliff, the silence is the opposite: vast and oceanic, the world expanding outward in every direction until the route you're on feels both tiny and at times insignificant. In the mountains, it's something else again — a vertical silence, the silence of altitude and scale, where the surrounding terrain makes you aware of your own smallness in a way that is, somehow, reassuring rather than frightening. What they all bring me is a sense of solititude I get nowhere else.

All three have shaped how I climb and, I think, who I am. 

What it does for the mind

I came to understand the mental health benefits of trad climbing gradually rather than all at once. It wasn't something I went looking for. But over the years I've recognised something reliable: the days I come home from the crag are just better days. Not because anything difficult has been resolved. Because I was forced, for several hours, to set everything else completely aside.

Trad climbing doesn't allow you to not be present in the moment. The gear you rush, the runner you half-clip, the foot you move without trusting — the rock finds all of it. And in finding it, it insists on your presence with a patient, implacable authority. Your mind clears not because you tried to clear it, but because it had no choice. I have never once thought about my inbox at thirty metres on a gritstone edge. A Dream of White Horses didn't allow a single outside thought for its entire length. I'm not sure anything else in my life can make that claim.

After tougher periods, I've come to think of certain crags as places where I've quietly put myself back together. Not dramatically. Just piece by piece, route by route — on warm gritstone above the moors, on salt-aired Anglesey rock with the sea below, in whatever particular peace comes from doing something serious that you love in a beautiful and wild place.

It stays with you

The thing about climbing is that it stays with you. Literally at first — your hands, arms and body carry it for days, a fine abrasion or ache that reminds you of where you've been. But also in some less tangible way. The routes you've done on the Grit, the decisions you made on a sea cliff traverse, the commitment you found somewhere in the mountains — those are part of me now in a way that is nearly impossible to explain to anyone who hasn't felt it.