Poles coppice quarry

This shall be my first project of the new year, I stumbled upon this old disused quarry towards the end of last year, after hearing about it in the "other places" section of the westmidlands rock guide, and have just recently been back to look at route possibilities.


After checking out a few of these old quarries I was thrilled to see the scale of this one, there was loads of rock there! Alright some of it was a bit loose but I was immediately drawn to the two main slabs smack bang in the middle.

A view of the two main slabs

I decided to first look at a route directly up the center of the larger wall to the right, and after a quick play on a grigri established this line:

Proposed new line.

After I had kicked most of the loose crap off i was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the climbing. The route starts with a slight rising traverse (with a lovely bouldery sidepull move) to a small stance, then follows just underneath the obvious ridge, untill you are able to move out right on three small crimps. From there the route goes straight to the top on a mix of two and three fingered sloping pockets(first knuckle joint).

After a little play on the moves I decided technically the route is around brittish 5a/5b, so then abseiled down the line to look for protection.

the route with the gear marked

What I found was pretty thin, the first piece is a zero G size 1 nut, which must be pushed into the crack then seated hard.
The second is a compilation of a zero 3 nut and a wild country size 1, both in semi-ok placements.
The slab is then pretty blank untill a small crack just before the end, where you can just wriggle in a zero size 2 nut to protect the top out.

With that in mind I finished the tea in my flask, packed up, and went home to see if I had enough cash to afford a set of micro stoppers.

right then.

hello to one and all and welcome to my blog, which should hopefully be covering all of my little projects and trips from now on, so lets get started.