A small cliff, up to about 10m high, in a superbly wild setting - up on the moors to the north east of Bellingham. The dark grey sandstone has an excellent texture with plenty of creases, pockets and nodules for climbing but there are still blank sections making most of the routes technical and demanding, often with sloping top-outs. The reputation for stiff grades and the long walk-in tend to make Callerhues less popular than many cliffs hereabouts.
The routes are largely the work of locals Bob and Tommy Smith who graded the routes back in the 1970s when the trend was to give short routes low adjectival grades. Since then, the national trend has tended to upgrade short hard routes and this has made the grades at Callerhues look extremely harsh. For some reason no guidebook has really bothered to re-assess the grades properly before now. In this book, to cries of "southern softies" from the locals, we have tried to give grades more in line with modern thinking. It is likely that we will not have got this correct for every route but hopefully the shock of starting up a VS which turns out to really be an E2 should be a thing of the past.