21/05/2026
Exmoor – Great Hangman Gut
Great Hangman Gut: 450 metres of rotten, magnificent gully tearing down the face of Exmoor’s biggest sea cliff, 300 metres above the Atlantic. Grade unknown – it had been raining all morning and the rock was weeping. We were fairly sure we were only the third party to attempt it. Fairly sure. So much of the cliff had shed itself since anyone last looked that it barely mattered.
Exmoor’s choss routes have a reputation that precedes them like a warning flare. Each one is a guaranteed first-class adventure – the kind where you buy the ticket before you’ve read the small print. There are very few people I’d rope up with for something this committing. Chris was one of them.
We started badly, as all good days do. An argument with a suspicious farmer about where we’d left the van burned twenty minutes and a surprising amount of goodwill. But we found the top of the route without too much trouble and stood there looking down: 300 metres of air between us and the sea, a monster cliff and the start of the day’s terror. .
Getting in was the question. We talked through the options with the forced calm of people who are slightly scared. Down the ridge, abseil off the end, follow a water course to the East, abseil again from there – all unknowns, all loose, all committing. We had a 100m 8mm rope and two 50m 8mm ropes between us. I had no interest whatsoever in hanging in space 80 metres above the second fastest tidal race in the world on an 8mm line, bouncing off crumbling rock faces, watching the rope slowly abrade through its own sheath. We made the only sensible call: down-lead it. No abseiling. Not today.
Pitch after pitch, we worked our way down. It was slow, serious climbing – the kind that wears quietly at your nerves. And then, after the last steep fixed abseil, we arrived.
It is difficult to overstate where we now found ourselves. We were standing on a grey pebble beach at the foot of the largest sea cliff outside of north-west Scotland. Behind us, the Atlantic. Above us, 300 metres of overhanging, dripping and loose. And bearing down on us, relentless and utterly indifferent to our schedule, was the second fastest tidal race in the world. The cliff had been described, with admirable understatement, as “an excellent place to be.”
There was no discussion. We moved.
The first pitch off the beach is the most serious, and it announces itself immediately. Stones whistle past your helmet from above without warning. The rock is wet, loose and choosy in every direction, the entire cliff seems to be quietly disintegrating around you. Twin ice axes and crampons are standard kit for routes like this and we were suited and booted accordingly. We set off into it.
What followed was one of those long, absorbing, deeply strange days that climbing occasionally delivers. Pitch after pitch, hour after hour. We hammered in pegs, placed warthogs, bashed homemade drive-ins, clipped bulldogs, and loaded the rack with every piece of iron we had.
We were tired and when we heaved over the top, we were relieved.
The path back to the van had never looked so good. We walked, aching, filthy, grinning. It had been and this word rarely gets its due - a proper adventure. Not a comfortable day out with scenery and a flask of tea. A real one, with genuine consequences and a clock we couldn’t control.
Anyone else fancy it?
