Donegal Rock Climbing Guidebook 2015

 And sho, what seems like a lifetime ago when I first started out on this noble quest the Mountaineering Ireland Donegal Rock Climbing Guidebook 2015 is back from the printers and is on sale through Mountaineering Ireland. More information HERE

Donegal Guidebook 2015

 This is a select guidebook to County Donegal it contains over 1000 outstanding rock climbs found throughout the entire length and breadth of the county from Muckross Head in the South to Malin Head at the northern tippy toe of the Inishowen Peninsula.

 The guide comprises 25 very different rock climbing areas these areas include Ireland's longest rock climb, Ireland's largest mountain crag, Ireland's highest sea stack as well as many more standard single and multi pitch venues above the sea, by the road, on the islands and in the mountains. Each area comprises descriptive text and an area map to ensure the ease of finding the location by any first time visitor. Throughout the book over 250 colour photographs have been used to help desc ribe every cliff and crag listed. This ensures that 96% the routes in the guide are shown on full colour photo topos with the photos that were taken from best angle/position and in optimum light so as to allow first time visitors to find their chosen routes. Each separate location is based on the online guide at Donegal on-line guide with each chapter in the book having an online counterpart. This allows more regular visitors to Donegal to explore further using these online more definite guides.

 The guide starts at Muckross in the south of the county and follows the coast clockwise to Tory Island. Along this coast we visit several of the previously established and documented locations such as Sail Rock, Malinbeg, Gola Island and Skelpoonagh Bay. This coast is by far the most developed areas of Donegal since the previous guide in 2002 with large numbers of new routes and locations on An Port coastline, Cruit and Arranmore Islands.

  Sail Rock

Cruit Island

Gola Island

 After Tory Island the guide goes inland and starting in the Bluestack Mountains back in the south of the county travels north over the Derryveagh Mountains, Muckish and Crockanaffrin to finish on the Inishowen Peninsula. The main developments since the previous guide have been at Ballaghageeha Buttress in the Poison Glen, Crockanaffrin and at Malin Head.

Bingorms

Crockanaffrin

Inishowen

 The guide then finishes with a short four page chapter outlining the huge winter climbing potential of the county and developments over the last 50 years.

Donegal Winter Climbing

 What this guidebook will provide both first time visitor and more seasoned Donegal climbers is several life times of outstanding and in many cases world class rock climbing in some of the most beautiful places in Ireland.

Iain Miller 

Tororragaun

Ireland's Newest Climbing Location

 Taking advantage of the outstanding late summer in the last few days in western Donegal, paddled out for a visit to the rarely visited Tororragaun Island. 

  

Tororragaun Film

   Tororragaun is a 22 metre high rocky granite island living in the channel between Gola and Umfin Islands four kilometres off the Gweedore coast. The island is effectively guarded on all sides by Gola Island quality Granite sea cliffs and off course the potential for climbing new routes is enormous. Running through the centre of the island is a huge, and I do mean HUGE, sea washed water spout. It is difficult to imagine the size of this water spout but it would easily accommodate a million tons of sea water at a time. During his visit Iain free soloed (unroped) five new 60 foot rock climbs on the seaward face of the island. These are the first recorded rock climbs on the island are in the Tororragaun free guidebook is Tororragaun Guidebook Webpage. 

   This rocky outcrop has been on the to do list for a couple of years and only now with a shiney sit on top and an indian summer the new routes account has been open on its seaward face. :-)

   There is no fresh water on the island and pretty much every horizontal surface is birded as this is home to approx. 500 nesting pairs of Fulmar and a token amount of Gannet.

   Access to the island by sea kayak from Port Arthur Pier at Map ref B798284 on the Gweedore Coast. Landing on Tororragaun is not without a certain degree of rocky uncertainty as there are no easy landing beaches, coves or recesses. The easiest landing is at the eastern tip of the island onto rock sea level ledges. With a west sea running the island provides excellent lee and this eastern tip has large non-tidal ledges for kayak storage.

Gweedore from Tororragaun

Gweedore Islands

Tororragaun Arch

Rock Climbing on Tororragaun

Sail Rock. Donegal Rock Climbing

 And sho, as summer comes to an end it is most definitely time to catch up on the backlog of much neglected unedited U-tube films, footage, pictures blog posts and in general trying to document some of the 200 or so days out playing on Donegal's sea cliffs, sea stacks and mountains this year so far. It has been beyond an outstanding year but more of that in future posts.

 One of this years Unique Ascent trainee Fionnuala Donnelly spent the middle of the summer seeking vertical pleasure on the Donegal coastline. On a sunny Saturday morning we paid a visit to one of Donegal's older and more established climbing venues to make an ascent of the classic VS Roaring Forties.

Sail Rock Film

 Sail Rock is an outstanding 80m high quartzite slab in an excellent coastal location living in amongst the much poorer quality rock on the sea cliffs along the spectacular Slieve League coastline in the south west of Co Donegal for the free online guide click here to download.
 The Slieve League area of Co Donegal has changed dramatically in the last year or two with the new improved access roads and the massive visitor footfall that Slieve League and the Wild Atlantic Way brings this to this area, it is now possible to drive very close to the crag and save the carrying of a 100 metres static abseil rope from the old car park.
 To find Sail Rock from the Slieve League access road, from the road keep looking towards the sea was you walk/drive along the road until you see the clifftop watch tower then simply follow the path from the road down to the tower, Once at the tower the summit of Sail Rock is but 50 metres to your east.
 Access to the base of Sail Rock is by either an abseil or by a very steep and quite loose alpine scramble down the ridge on the opposite side of the basin to the face. The abseil down the face is by far the best way to reach the base of the face and the start of the routes. Alas as this was not our primary venue choice for today and there was a sea stack in Mayo still laugh at us from across the bay we did not have our 100 metre static with us and so a descent of the ridge it was by default. 

 It took about 25 steep loose minutes to gain the cauldron at the bottom of the routes. We descended the loose aréte until approx 40 metres above the sea and then did an easy 50 metre traverse into the top of the bason and pretty much the start of Mainmast.

Abseil down Sail Rock

Access Traverse

The Base of Sail Rock

Looking up Sail Rock

 Anyways on this occasion Fionnuala and my good self climbed Roaring Forties combined the first two pitches and savoured the last pitch especially the final 10 metre pull out onto the main face jugfest. 

 Looking down pitch 2

Topping Out

Stag Rocks Donegal

 Living 7 kilometres of the west coast of Donegal are a tiny collection of three rocky islands known as Stag Rocks or simply the Stags of Owey. They live 2 km directly out into the ocean from the seaward side of Owey Island. The islands themselves are only 6 meters high on their summits and they are surrounded by semi submerged skerries which means they are normally surrounded by very turbulent water. This makes them a tad tricky to access as they are by any stretch of the imagination a long way from mainland Donegal.

 I have had the idea to land on these remote outcrops for several years now but always seemed to distracted by slightly higher offshore islands when the seas wee calm enough to allow safe access. Anyways after several recces looking at different options and exit points from mainland Donegal. It became very apparent I needed a more sea worthy vessel than the ever faithful Lidl dingy. Step forward the Decathlon one person inflatable kayak and what better way to to have its maiden voyage than the Stags.

Stag Rocks Film

 Set sail from the far tip of cruit Island at the Owey Pier with a short paddle out to the lee of Owey Islands north coast. It was then simply a case of making the 2 km open sea passage out to the Stags. This sea passage took it seemed forever as the Stags never got any closer no matter how long I was paddling for. When I arrived at the Stags there was a touch of white water and the only sane place to land was on the NE tip of the North Island and after a wee bit of hesitation and bouncing about made a successful landing.  

Donegal from Stag Rocks

 It is safe to say this very rarely visited remote rocky outcrop is an outstanding place to be especially when the sun is shining in a bright blue sky. 

Donegal Rock Climbing 2015

The Story so far in 2015..........

 So far in 2015 it has been a very mixed bag of weather and sea conditions with a 3 week tropical heatwave at the start of April to the thunder storms and the near return of winter in mid May. But no matter what the weather brings we have been out to play pretty much every day, with visits to every main climbing location in Donegal so far this year and all, I hasten to add, in glorious sunshine.

Owey Island Rock Climbing

Owey Island Rock Climbing

Tory Island Rock Climbing

 On a wee visit from the U.K. Ian Parnell, Ben Wilkinson, Jon Winter and Henry Jepson made hay while the Donegal sun shone with visits to Owey Island, Sail Rock, Lurking Fear and Cruit Island. With new routes by the Holy Jaysus Wall on Owey and Lurking Fear Stack, the sea and the weather played ball.

Cnoc na Mara trio

Lurking Fear Stack

 No visit to to the cliffs of SW Donegal is complete without a look at Sail Rock. We arrived mid afternoon and after an abseil rigging and a 100m rope uncoiling session two teams were at the base of the face. Ian and Ben going for Mainmast and Jon and Henry nipping up Roaring Forties.

Sail Rock

Sail Rock in evening sun

  In classic bouncefest fashion and with a modicum of mild concern five different stacks have been climbed fourteen times so far in 2015. A considerable number of mainstream climbing press have had forays into the shady world of sea stacks climbing. It is an entirely different sport taking people onto sea stacks whom you know are going to publish their thoughts in well read publications. Taking someone who has never climbed a stack before (and in most cases never climbed before) onto a nautical summit through white water rage and into the pits of hate is a bit of a mind blower and it never ceases to be enormous fun.

   Sea Stack Climbing

The Sturrall Headland

Donegal Sea Stack

 Off course, sea stack climbing is not all about The Pits of Hate and Davie Jones Locker it also has a much lighter side and when Gaia and Neptune allow, a day out on a nautical summit will be a most relaxed affair with close encounters with many sea creatures in their natural habitat and a visit to your inner self. 

  

The End's of the Earth Sea Stack

Sea Stack Summit View 

 When not out playing I currently spend far too much time lying under a laptop editing the future Donegal Guidebook. A couple of months ago I thought it was finished alas my knowledge of publishing matters was sadly lacking and as it turned out there was still much to do. Where Dave Flanagan and myself are at the moment is we have approx 2/3rds of the book complete. As it is a select guide and covering the entire county what crags and routes to include was always going to be tricky but that is done and what we are doing now is all the nitty gritty editing that I did not realise had to be done. :-( Below are a couple of screenshots of finished pages, Gola island and Muckross as random samples.

 Donegal Guidebook Screenshot: Gola

Donegal Guidebook Screenshot: Muckross

 One of the great ironies of writing a guidebook is that even before it is published new crags and new routes are being found and climbed, that there is simply not room to include in a select guide to the county. So in essence you spend an evening editing a crag and the next day you go out climb a new route thus making your previous nights editing out of date. :-) Below is a couple of shots of Beyond the Ends of the Earth Crag, the first being a new two star route climbed with a couple of America visitors to the county last week. I95 take the centre line up the highest part of the crag at about 30m long and graded Hard Severe.

 Donegal Rock Climbing

Donegal Rock Climbing

 Living in such a fickle climate so close to the Eastern Atlantic it is always a case of good prior planning as to where to play out on the almost endless vertical mediums found around Co Donegal. 

 Sunset at Muckross Head

Donegal Rock Climbing Guidebook 2015

update from 9th Feb 2015 Donegal Guidebook 2015

 And sho, following on from the above post and where we were at three weeks ago, there has been a change or three to the original cunning plan.

 The Donegal Rock Climbing Guidebook 2015 is now a 352 page select guide to the entire county and covers every uber classic route from Muckross Head to Malin Head. What has been done is to take the two volumes I edited over the winter and which weighed in at near 700 pages and dissect them into a single select guide. (for information on the two volumes see above link)

 This has been done and we are now at the getting my amateur Indesign bothering guide to a proper publisher for the transition to a book. Step forth Noble Brother Dave Flannagan and Three Rock Books, Dave is now on board for a wee bit (lot) of Indesign wisdom and has been signed by Mountaineering Ireland to get this guidebook to a printer friendly state. 

 This is a massive relief to my good self as I took the production of this project as far as I could and without the necessary further publishing skills I always knew a dead end was in sight.

 What Dave and myself are currently doing is sorting each chapter at a time. The routes, crags and content is all ready decided with the guide now having 5 distinct chapters (from South to North) and each chapter split into localised areas. This is off course, the fine tuning stage and it is this attention to detail that makes or breaks a guidebook. Below are a couple of screen shots from the five chapters and gives an idea of where we are are at present. :-)

The five chapters are: 

South Donegal

        

Muckross Rock Climbing

South West

End's of the Earth Crag

West

Owey Island Rock Climbing

Mountains

The Bingorms

North

Cnoc na Affrain

Tory Island

   

Donegal Rock Climbing Guidebook 2015

Donegal Guidebook 2015

 The future volume 1 Rock Climbers guidebook to Donegal is currently in it's final stages of proof reading and grammar correction, to say it has been a bit epic getting the project to this stage, would be an understatement of biblical proportions. Gathering the new route information from lines completed since the previous guide involved 100s of e-mails and PMs to many different climbers mostly following vague rumours and whispers. This information was used to build the free on-line PDFs for each section and location found around the county, Donegal on-line guide.

 Due to the vast and dis-connected nature to almost 3000 of the recorded rock climbs in Co. Donegal it was necessary to first decide how much rock to actually put into a guidebook. It eventually made sense to produce two guides each detailing two very separate climbing mediums and locations. 

Volume 1

 The first guide covers Belshade to Tory Island by simply following the coastline clockwise and jumping on and off and island or three. This volume covers vast areas of new locations, crags and islands. Having been heavily involved in the development of many of these areas it made the process both very easy and very difficult to decide what to include/exclude. For example, having met an angel at the base of a remote sea stack on a solo first ascent mission, does this influence the inclusion of the stack in a guidebook? Thankfully this stack provides a world class rock climb, so the decision to include was an easy one to make.

 An Bhuideal Sea Stack Film

Volume 2
 In the second guidebook we travel inland and visit the uplands of the county in both summer and winter. With visits to Ireland’s largest mountain crag and Ireland’s longest ice climb both of which live in the Poison Glen in the Derryveagh Mountains. We then head north over Errigal and Muckish Mountains to Kerrykeel. Our final destination is Malinhead at Ireland’s most northerly point on the Inishowen Peninsula.

Muckross Rock Climbing

Owey Island Rock Climbing

 Volume 1 covers a vast collection of areas on many different mediums, starting on the established two mountain granite venues in the Bluestack Mountains, Belshade and Eglish Valley. We then simply follow the coastline clockwise to Tory Island. The locations around the coast of South and West Donegal contain a perfect mix of previously published venues such as Muckross, Gola Island and Malinbeg. Over fifty percent of the guidebook is previously unpublished information on locations and routes such as Ends of the Ends Crag, and the Slievetooey Coast. Where perhaps the largest change in routes from previous Donegal guides are on Cruit, Owey and Tory Islands where development since the previous guide has been a bit prolific. These sections are much larger by a country mile than any of the previous guidebooks to the county. And finally there are off course the sea stacks, with far too many climbed stacks to possibly ever put into a standard and sensible sized guidebook. What I simply did was choose a good selection of outstanding and in several cases world class sea stack climbs from Diff to XS from all along the coast and islands.       

Cruit Island Rock Climbing

Gola Island Rock Climbing

 In the past year or two, three Irish guidebooks have been published one was in the form of an App to Donegal created by me. (Donegal rock climbing App). It was most definitely a wee experiment in Irish guidebook writing and several parts of it are recreated in a slightly different format in these two hardcopy Donegal Guidebooks.

 The next was the Fairhead guide, edited by Craig Hiller and Ricky Bell. Craig being a professional photographer and Ricky being Ireland's best rock climber, their guidebook raised the standard of Irish guidebooks considerably. It was the first to use all colour double page spread topos and it was also the first to be edited and indesigned by the authors and not a publishing house.

 Then came Dave Flannigan's select Guide to Ireland, a huge undertaking to not only choose but to fit all the best rock climbing in the country into one book. It raised the already high bar set by the Fairhead Guide up a notch or two and currently sets the standard for Irish climbing guidebooks. It should be noted Dave had already began raising the Irish guidebook standards in 2009 with his first guidebook "Bouldering in Ireland."
 With "Rock Climbing in Ireland," currently setting the Irish guidebook Gold standard, any guide coming out now at a lower standard is alas doomed to fail. With this in mind I returned to many venues around Donegal at different times of morning and evening to get the best crag shots. It is the modern crag shot topos and clear directions to the crag that make a guide user friendly to the first time visitor to the areas described.
         

Ends of the Earth Crag

                   

Winter Climbing in Donegal, Ireland.

 Winter climbing conditions in Ireland are a reasonably rare commodity with the ever present south west trade winds stripping all Jack Frost's good work from the mountains in an alarmingly short time. With the majority of Ireland's mountains being of a more modest height than their Scottish counterparts and  being subject to the same freeze thaw cycles as Scotland, the thaw cycles can be a lot more devastating to the néve and fat ice build up.
 What is required for good winter conditions is at least five days of at least minus 5 at night with daytime temperature hovering about +3. Two further requirements to create good conditions are a good freeve prior to the first snow dump to allow the turf to freeze. It is quite rare for Donegal to get several big dumps of snow which create a complex snow pack. It is much a more regular occurrence for Donegal to get one large snow dump and then consolidation occurs to this single snow mass.

 For more information check the Donegal Winter Climbers guidebook, Donegal Winter Climbing.     

Winter Climbing in Donegal Film

 Anyways, when winter does play ball in Donegal the mountains are transformed into a winter mountaineering playground. The north faces of Slieve Snaght, the Poison Glen, Errigal and Muckish being the prime winter climbing venues. These faces are predominantly very wet places during the summer months with this seepage in the winter months providing the perfect amount of water for good ice build up.

 Below are a few wintery pictures of Donegals mountains over the past few years, every winter has been very different from the previous year. Some years there is an abundance of snow and very little freezing temperatures and other years it freezes so hard and quick that no snow falls and streams freeze at source and no ice cascades form.

Errigal from Slieve Snaght

  The above picture shows the view from the summit of Slieve Snaght looking north towards Errigal. The gully in the foreground contains a shade over 6 meters of snow drift. We attempted to sleep the night in a snow hole, which took hours to dig out, alas the thaw came a few hours earlier and the roof collapsed as the sun set. We walked home off the hills in the dark.

Looking across the Poison Glen to Slieve Snaght

   From the summit of Maumlack looking across the Poison Glen to Slieve Snaght, the alpine faces of the Poison Glen were in pristine winter condition with near 1000ft of compact néve in the gullies and the two falls transformed into near complete multi tiered cascades.

The Aghlas from Dooish Summit

Grogan Mor Plateau

Ice climbing on Muckish

Errigal above very dense cloud

Sunrise walking on winter mountains