We arrived early this morning (8am) to find some campers under the crag- litter, smashed beer bottles, big campfire under Point Break. Thought it was local lads camping up there, making a mess. We made sure they woke up, by talking in the vicinity. Anyway a lady shouted to us from the main path below. We assumed she thought we were the campers. We went to speak to her (with the intention of explaining we were just boulderers) and found out it was her 16 year old son and his 2 friends. She is the new land owner and claimed (no reason to doubt it) that she owned the crag as well as the house, lake etc below the crag.
Fortunately we had not given her son any direct or indirect abuse (just woken the poor boys!) Anyway she said that she is happy for us to climb/boulder there (hopefully this will continue, she seemed genuine). She has erected a fence below the crag because she is planning to put some sheep there.
The boys trudged back to the house after making a kind of attempt to tidy up. The fire was left in place and a some litter/bottles (one boy asked the son whether they should do anything about the fire and he said that the wind would deal with it! The fire has the remaining bottles in it! I have a feeling they might have had the last fire, that I remember someone complaining about on here and it was cleared up by a climber (perhaps this explains the boys belief in the amazing power of the wind!)
Anyway just thought it was best that everyone is aware of the situation- As it is their land then we need to be careful not to get on the wrong side of them. They can effectively do what they want. I guess these camps will be a relatively rare occasion and as they now have in there mind that they might get woken after probably only a few hours sleep, it might be the last one in that spot.
It might be best to leave the embers for a while and see if the lads/owner gets around to removing the embers- although I doubt this will happen. I removed the scattering of litter and glass so it looks pretty ok.
