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Showing posts from 2016

Ben Lomond - a Gaelic palette

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Loch Lomond, Wednesday 28th December 2016 Mist, water and silvery light: a very Gaelic palette in midwinter between the storms, which these days all have names - we've been through Barbara's tantrums and Conor's backlash, but today was one of those steamed-up car sort of days. Warmish air from the southwest is rolling about Loch Lomond and gathering a chill as it picks up speed towards the snow-patched summit, so I take the clockwise 'wind with my back' option, steeply up the Ptarmigan ridge from Rowardennan, hearing a chuckle in the mist which is either a red grouse or the eponymous bird. Each landmark on the map is a clue to the Gaelic landscape - Tom Fhithich I think may be the raven's beak-nosed boulder or crag half up towards the knoll of Ptarmigan, which just breaks the mist, and assumes the role of target summit for the meantime as the main peak is in cloud. The small hidden tarns are full of slushy grey ice and the 'yellow bealach' is a

Outwith the Anthropocene

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...move lightly, trace the rock like shadow, let it return  I was struck by one sentence in Robert MacFarlane's darkly sparkling article on Generation Anthropocene in the Guardian recently, when he is pointing us to the artistic response to living in a new geological era created by our own presence and detritus: '...salvation and self-knowledge can no longer be found in a mountain peak or stooping falcon, and categories such as the picturesque or even the beautiful congeal into kitsch.' Romantic notions of the sublime are dead and even our so-called wildernesses, such as the Highland bleakness, are manufactured landscapes appealing to our sense of self-reflective emptiness and vistas of consciousness. They are accidents of land management, political histories of resource and exhaustion, 'wilded' by deforestatation and adjusted to our current sensitivites. Where now can the picturesque be found, in a world of plastic seas and turtles drowned in fishing n

The Legacy of Names: Craigmore Crag

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Craigmore Jamies Overhang x4 from John Stewart Watson on Vimeo . Craigmore has always been a favourite haunt of mine. It's a small forested crag near Carbeth, north of Glasgow, just off the beaten track of the West Highland Way. It's been a popular top-roping and soloing spot for decades, ever since John Kerry ( blog here about him ) bussed out with gardening equipment to clean and garden the routes - it's a north-east facing crag and tends to gather a lot of dank moss and vegetation. John produced a guide to the climbing in the 'Glasgow Outcrops' guide by Highrange Sports (1975), describing the rock as 'macroporphyritic basalt, which looks rather like a cross between granite and gritstone'. The habitat is rock, moss, birch, oak, rowan, hazel, apple and willow, with two Scots pines acting as crag sentinels at each end. Owls, kestrels and smaller birds ghost through the canopy and bumble bees hum through the flowers and catkins in summer like vid

Glencoe March 19th 2016

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March sunshine over the Buachaille from the best-sited hut in Scotland

Hareline

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Bouldering in early March in Scotland can be graced by cold sunshine and serendipitous moments. This is a nice little traverse into the frustratingly good smear work of The Plinth, a problem which got me going again after a long winter of injury and downtime. Named after two hares I spooked that set off like random fireworks, it's a starting gun for 2016.