Sally In The Woods was a rumour at our climbing centre. There was somewhere in the direction of Bath that you could climb at. The nearest place to us that wasn’t sandstone. Hooray!
When we googled the place to see what to expect there was nothing about climbing, only ghost stories about a Victorian girl called Sally who had died whilst locked in a tower in some woods close to…. Oh. Bath!
There’s a bit of info on the UK Climbing site and a few blogs, but that just confused us even more with comments about it not being public land, how you’re not welcome there and that routes were hard to find. Oh yes, and confirmation that it’s haunted.
Well, this seemed weird and intriguing and now I wanted to go!
Finding the place isn’t hard – it’s on Google Maps which takes you directly to the road you need, but finding the parking was trickier. We had been given instruction to park in the ‘longest layby’, which turned out to be perfect, but identifying which layby that was took a few drives up the road. In hindsight, it’s simple but it all had a bit of an un-easy feeling at this stage. Should we be there? Was there a ghost? Was there an angry farmer?!
After locating the lay-by and navigating the barbed wire, it’s just a walk up the hill until you reach the main path. If you walk to your left as you arrive at the trail you’ll see the first boulder within minutes. And then another, and then another and another! This place is really cool. HOW are these boulders here?!
We had managed to get our hands on the much sought after guide written by Gareth Pratt. This is absolute gold dust and I can’t imagine navigating this place without it. Using this in conjunction with the ‘what3words’ app is genius.
There’s a load of boulders to climb here, all completely varying difficulty levels, so my expert friend wasn’t bored and neither was less expert me! We climbed, spotted, climbed, spotted. Occasionally shooting a glance round at the sound of a broken twig, not being able to shake the feeling that we shouldn’t be there!
We started our day on the Yew Tree Slab because it’s the first boulder you come across and we were raring to go. There’s a lot of routes there so we spent a decent amount of time on it before moving on round to the Yew Tree Traverse, looked at and got freaked out at the Bad Landing Project and attempted some on The Fridge. Mike’s Boulder is excellent and we spent most of the afternoon there. It’s the only place we saw others at. We heard them coming and froze, thinking it was Sally finally appearing or the land owner ready to chuck us off, but no, it was just other boulder-ers who had come along the path hoping it was unoccupied.
My regret is not moving on and exploring all of the caves and remaining boulders, but I guess there’s only limited time between the boulders drying early afternoon and us tiring out! There is so much here to go back and work on.
I climb outdoors much less than I do at the gym and find it tiring in a different way. Much harder on the hands and a lot more hanging on holds wondering where to go. Generally though, it is less intense and I can last longer outside enjoying a chilled out day with friends.
Whose land this is I am really not sure, but the feeling that we were trespassing there gave us a heightened sense of adrenaline and adventure. We’ve since found that it’s supposedly fair game and so although I don’t want to encourage you to go (since I don’t want it to get busier!) I can’t recommended this place enough and am SO glad that we went.
What a great day of boulder!
[Please note: We went on a weekday. We were the only people bouldering for most of the time and only saw two other pairs of climbers during the day. Although there’s plenty of stone to go around I imagine parking would be a pain on the weekends.
Also note: I have the sought after guide that I mentioned. Please message me!]
