Clogwyn y Fulfran

PSC
A Climbers’ Club Publication Sub Committee meeting took me to Wales this weekend… It was a long meeting – six hours! Even with that duration we fairly cantered through the agenda to cover everything, so several topics were barely skimmed over. However, by midnight we’d covered everything and another amazing year for CC guidebooks is on the cards. 2010 saw the CC publish three great new guidebooks; Ogwen, Symonds Yat, and Tremadog, plus a supplement to West Cornwall isn’t far off now. The 2011 publishing timetable is going to be equally exciting!

Clogwyn y Fulfran
Before the meeting we took advantage of the wonderful autumn weather, it held on just long enough before the rain on Sunday to give us a fantastic day out in the sunshine amongst the colourful autumn leaves.

As an aside, British seasons – from a climber’s perspective – seem to be:

• Summer – promises so much with it’s warm sunny days and long hours of daylight. But fails to deliver the warmth and it seems to rain more often than the sun comes out! Always seems to be a disappointing season. 🙁
• Autumn – doesn’t promise that much and yet so often this season over delivers! Settled dry weather and beautiful colours highlighted by the low angled autumn sunshine – wonderful. 🙂
• Winter – after the misery of November’s perpetual rain and the festivity of December, winter raises high hopes of cold clear days with deep consolidated snow with thick ice dripping from the cliffs. Sure, the last couple of years have been pretty good, but what will this winter-season bring? :freeze:
• Spring – easily the best season for rock climbing, perfect temperatures, wild flowers colouring the landscape, bird song, and normally the longest periods of dry settled weather. Brilliant. So why do so many people go on holiday in spring? Just last week I heard some people planning a trip to Kalymnos for May. Crazy. The driest and most beautiful month of the British climbing calendar and they leave… 😛

Anyway, back to Wales this weekend. Here are a couple of shots of a nice E1 on Clogwyn y Fulfran, Sunrise.

After we’d done Sunrise we saw a tiny little bat (is it a Lesser Horseshoe bat?) flying just a few centimetres above the water chasing (and presumably catching) little flying insects. :yum: It wizzed back and forth below the cliff, which comes straight out of the water – almost like sea-cliff climbing – for quite some time before vanishing in to a crack high up on the cliff face. Is it normal for bats to feed in the afternoon like this? Was it just trying to fatten up that little bit extra before hibernating?

It was flying very fast, and the low light meant our compact camera couldn’t take a fast enough shot to do the little creature justice…