The Churnet Valley

The Churnet gets less esoteric with every new guidebook, and should really be a prime venue on any Peak boulderer’s map. Lovely crags on two sides of a river, easy walking from the car park on good tracks and pockets of sound where the quiet is punctuated every 10 seconds by screams from the nearby Alton Towers. The climbing is brilliant – a number of classic long traverses and classic boulder problems that range from the very easy to 7c+. The rock in the Churnet is a sandstone conglomerate – some of which is fantastic, with solid pebbles, nice flakes and deep pockets in good, fine-grained sandstone – but in other parts it’s like flapjack. Happily, almost all of the bouldering takes place on the former.