GETTING to the top of a mountain is not for climbers. That's for hillwalkers, skiers, or tourists with litter. And folk lugging pianos for charity. I know climbers who have spent a whole season on rock and almost never reached a top. Some masters of ascension wobble, sweat, and profess incipient vertigo when you float the very idea of going for the summit.

And there's even a faction that's made an enviable, languid cult of only climbing down to their climbs. Sea cliff routes are their game. And a sybaritic obsession it is. While intrepid trippers fight man, wife and childfully for their sandy place in the sun, these tense, free spirits chew on quite another stick of rock in quiet, adjacent coves apparently oblivious to the holiday mayhem distant and below.

The fact that the lycra team might have skidded in dank descent gullies or hung perilously short of touchdown on greasy ropes just to progress the venture is neither here nor there. Some fear malevolent tides or freak waves will snatch them from seemingly impregnable plinths to a watery grave. But that's life. Or, in this case, death.

Summer's golden orb kisses flawless granite walls and flames the regular inflammatory T-shirt. As a restless ocean beats its slow tattoo, the merely slightly daunted make their play on sheer, warm and salty pillars and facades. Maybe the local bird life, at seriously committing moves, will gob or worse on you from no great height, but nothing's completely perfect.

Cornwall, of all Britain's great and multi-varied sea cliff theatres, probably comes nearest to the idyll. We first drove there in May '82, just as the Falklands War erupted. It was early season, chill, overcast and windy for a day or two (it snowed at home) and it seemed the only real excitement on offer was driving to the clifftops with an ear to the car radio reports from the South Atlantic.

Unfit, deprived of regular rock challenge for ages and as wary of the cliff approaches as the climbs, we opted on this trip for the gentler, classic lines around Bosigran, Sennen, and Chair Ladder in West Menwith, the most southerly bite in the UK mainland.

The Cornwall coast is sheer and cut with intimidating zawns, or cave inlets. And its climbing pedigree is long. Sir Leslie Stephen, the most eminent literary critic of his day and father of Virginia Woolf, made the first sortie on the local cliffs in the last century. But it was A W Andrews, a regular combatant on Lliwedd in Snowdonia, and a 1900 Wimbledon singles semi-finalist, who later set the sea cliff pace.

Arthur, a European gold medal miler, had spent many family holidays with his uncle, the distinguished jurist, John Westlake, at his home in Zennor, near St Ives. He prowled the pink Penwith coast for 20 years, developing a crab-like yen for solo cliff traverses and introduced sannies to the sport - a highly creditable first. Maybe he simply found his rubber tennis shoes lighter and cooler than the habitual clinkered boots. Mostly, they stuck better, too.

Anyway, he voiced the delights of Cornwall's opulent reddish-brown granite and distinctive feldspar flecks to all and sundry. Over the years, many came to test the water and the rock, among them Haskett-Smith, the Napes Needle head-stander; Winthrop-Young, who climbed the Matterhorn with his self-designed artificial leg; Mallory, of Everest mystery; and, later, Colin Kirkus and Menlove Edwards, whose fondness for deep play led to the drowning of some marines who tried to emulate the powerful rock climber's risky swims.

H D Lawrence stayed in the Zennor neighbourhood with his German wife, Frieda, during WWI. He lived in poverty, writing The Rainbow, a novel rapidly suppressed for ''obscenity''. The couple may have wandered the high trails, absorbing bracing coastal scenery and the air meant to improve Lawrence's tubercular lungs. The couple were ejected from Cornwall in 1917 on local suspicion that they were signalling at night to enemy submarines.

It was Andrews, with his sister Elsie, who pioneered the admirable, 700ft Commando Ridge at Bosigran. With its often tricky tidal entry, the mildly difficulty and seemingly interminable, spinal traverse is a rare intro into the quality of Cornish rock. Main Face, across Porthmoina Island, though, is where much of the real action unfolds.

This is quintessential Penwith. Cliffs of character plastered with fine, exposed climbs ranging widely in technique from gems like Alison Rib (difficult), to the brilliant Doorpost (hard severe), the bold classic, Suicide Wall (Extreme 1) and an even tougher nut, Kafoozalem (E4). Bosigran's tick list options seem endless and reach from the open play area below the defunct tin mine and Count House into the fearsome confines of Great Zawn with its sustained showpiece, Dream/Liberator, E3.

We enjoyed harder routes in the deep south but four-star Doorpost is a must for all aficionados. The new stylish, arty Cicerone guide to Cornish Rock by the master of Penwith, Roland Edwards and Tim Dennell, says pointedly: ''The classic of the area at its grade, offering continually varied and interesting climbing; the technical difficulties ease on pitch 3, allowing vertigo to become your companion.''

Ahhh. It pays for the leader here to express tension to his mate below for the moves from the belay look out the window. The smile of relief when your second locates the lock-tight granite filigree on the edge of the world is easily worth the ploy.

Edwards, and his remarkable son, Mark, have weathered more Cornish storms than the old coastal packets. Years of controversy over their style of selective protection seems to have subsided in the BMC ethic of no bolts on local sea cliffs or outcrops.

Mark and dad, of course, are the ultimate consultants on Penwith developments and safety. Consult, if poss, before the event. After a fright leading Bishop's Rib (hard, very severe) at glorious Chair Ladder, I ventured later over a beer with Roland it might slightly be under-graded. Yes, he confirmed, a key hold had vanished a week or two before and the grade was now E1!

You'll love Cornwall. Be kind to rock, birds and fragile flora.