Rhubarb Buttress

This is probably the last buttress to be fully developed in the dale and has proved an ideal setting for climbers operating in the easier sport grades or as a warm up to harder things on the Cornice. Obviously other routes had been added here before such as the traditional routes of Bad Blood, the European Female and Turbo-Charged Monster Mouse and a little later with sport routes such as Keith Sharple’s the Day of the Long Knives (7b+), Malc Taylor’s Fat Ginger cat (7a+) and Ruth Jenkin’s Desire (8a+) but there still remained scope for a lot of climbing on the easier walls to the left.

In 1998 the cliff was firmly redeveloped by Gary Gibson and the cliff opened up to provide an extremely amenable venue. The majority of the routes climbed are in the sports-climbing ‘6’ grade and a number have been of a reasonable quality.

How to get there

If approaching from upstream, follow the railway track through the two tunnels to the closed tunnel. Turn right via the path and double back under the bridge and over the river, bridge permitting. Follow the path under the Cornice and 100m further on lies the crag. When approaching from Wormhill of Miller’s Dale once into the dale over a small footbridge and after a descent down some rocky steps the cliff is the first on the right.

What’s the climbing like?

All of the new routes climb vertical walls with generally technical climbing and the odd bulge thrown in for good measure. The harder routes generally take large powerful bulges topped off by some very fingery and technical climbing.

When should I go there?

The cliff can take a while to dry out in the spring but once dry can be climbed in wet weather due to a very effected tree canopy: once gone the seepage does take some time to return. Like most of the cliffs in the dale the problem of midges can occur in very humid weather and unfortunately the cliff gets very little sunshine.