In reply to UKC Gear:
Bit of a weird review. It's not very comprehensive is it?
My main gripe with the book (upon flicking through) was the downgrading of a lot of the bouldering grades, the decision of which to do so seems to have been made by one person without any consultation of people who have climbed the problems over the past few years (it's called a consensus - i thought i shld make that point seeing as it was ignored for the book) since the rockfax dorset book came out and listed the boulder problems for the first time.
It's been posted on here some time back by what i think was the first ascenionist of the problems (i could be wrong but surely it's only he/she who should be able to change the grade of the problem) that they were doing a lot of peak problems using the b grades at the time and got confused when transferring this to Portland. If you're so confused about converting grades maybe you shouldn't be mucking around with them again at this point! Oh, too late.. It all comes across as badly thought out.
i.e. on Rockfax 'the groove' V6, down to V3 in CC book. Look at comments on the database by people such as Ben Stokes (to name one). He thinks V4. I think V5. Anyway, dropping it 3 grades on a whim just seems odd to me.
Same for Pete's rib, V7 down to V4 etc etc
Anyway, my point is, the cc might be catching up in terms of graphics/topos etc for it's guidebooks but it could still learn a lot from the rockfax online voting system for grades. I personally don't believe it is right for a small local minority to dictate the grades of their local area. If they do so it unjustly reflects on the grades i.e. if you did the green traverse every week it may well start to feel like a V3 and not a V6, but this isn't actually the case and any visiting climber will discover the true grade. Hence why the RF database works so well IMO...
rant over