Posts

Showing posts from 2018

Scottish Bouldering #New Glasgow climbing wall: The Prop Store

Image
The Glasgow branch of The Climbing Academy (TCA) is just about to open its new bouldering and lead-climbing centre on Glasgow's north side. Its south-side twin ('The News Room')  is already a popular bouldering centre, but the new site will bring fresh inspiration to climbers on the north side of the Clyde. Situated in Maryhill, not far from the West End, this new centre is named after an old BBC prop warehouse, so it's been named ' The Prop Store '.  The centre feels roomy and spacious with a long profile. The holds and panels are super-grippy and there are some free-standing boulders to mantle out as well as an impressive offering of angles, roofs, slabs and subtly sweeping walls.  There is also a section of lead wall with auto-belays for top-roping practice, and a training centre upstairs. They should be open this December, but here are some preview shots.

Timeline Walks of Scotland #Hallaig to Screapadal on Raasay

Image
'Tha tìm, am fiadh, an coille Hallaig ...' Hallaig - the lost village of Raasay - is a powerful place. Arguably, it has become a shibboleth for the soul of Gaelic culture. To visit it, to just be there momentarily and feel the resonance of the place, is to know the fragility of place and home, of how kinship can be shattered and how loss can invade a land. Aptly, Hallaig is now a site of pilgrimage for those who value the universal lessons of history.  There are t errible reasons for the loss of Hallaig. Its silent mouths of abandoned shielings, the dumb sheep meandering amongst the ruins, whisper with Sorley MacLean's poetry. The place misses the sounds of day-to-day community, and all around the woods and burns and slopes this tough but rich landscape once made this a hardy paradise under the eastern cliffs of Raasay. Facing east to the dawn and overlooking the peninsula of Applecross and the berry-dark depths of the Inner Sound, the walk to Hallaig leads quietly

Timeline Walks of Scotland #Culbin Sands

Image
The Moray Firth’s sand-bitten southern coast, between Findhorn and Nairn, is home to Scotland’s most cautionary tract of land. Now a wilderness of maritime forest, dunes, salt marsh and spits of sand, its human history has been dated to the Bronze Age, around 1300 BC, but it is a territory that since glacial times would have been mobile and mutable. The Laich of Moray is the fertile strip of plain squeezed between the foothills of the Cairngorms and the Moray Firth’s south coast. In Gaelic it is called Machair Mhoireibh (the machair of Moray), a perfect habitat for golf courses and rich arable farmland, threaded by the glacially-rivered straths of Nairn, Findhorn and Spey. Culbin is an old parish which is now buried under 28 square kilometres of duneland and recent forestry. Sweeping east of Narin and curving in to rise up to its greatest heights above the estuary of the River Findhorn, it is now managed by Forestry Commission Scotland, but it is notable that this is a humanl

Highlands history from Edinburgh University Press

Image
Edinburgh University Press is the home of scholarship for Scottish history, in particular the history of the Highlands, having published the likes of Eric Richards' Debating The Highland Clearances, Tom Furniss's Discovering the Footsteps of Time , Robert Dodgshon's history of the rural environment called No Stone Unturned , and John Roberts' history of the Highland clans Feuds, Forays and Rebellions .  A tremendous resource for the lay historian and scholar alike is the journal  Northern Scotland , which is moving to two issues a year as of 2019. It is the home for seminal articles on the history of the Highlands and Islands, including such popular issues as land ownership, culture, emigration and diaspora, and biography. It is chaired by  Annie Tindley  who is Senior Lecturer in Modern British History at Newcastle University. Annie is also editor of the new book series at EUP, called 'Scotland's Land' which has just published its first volu

Scotland's Iconic Mountains #Broad Law

Image
BROAD LAW The rolling hills east of the modern motorway of the M74 hold much more character and history than they appear from the west, where they are now flanked by forestries of spruce and wind-farms. In medieval times this was a Scottish royal hunting ground – the ‘Ettrick Forest’.  Further east towards the Tweed valley, there are echoes of a deeper Scottish history in the border towns of Hawick, Selkirk, Galashiels, Peebles and Kelso, all on the banks of the historic River Tweed and famous for their medieval forts and abbeys.  Looking west from Broad Law to the monoculture forestry and wind-farms of 21st C Scotland This range of hills, along with the northern flanks of the Cheviot hills, marks the geographical transition to the once-contested border with Northumberland, with its high pass over Carter Bar on the A68. The more useful sense of boundaries are suggested not by the roads but by the watersheds: to the north the waters drain into the River Clyde; to th

Spring, again

Image
The boulders sit on a small wooded alp under the crag overlooking the Achray Water sliding by below, a ribbon of invisible clarity full of spring's snow-melt. It's early April in Scotland. A dipper's song rings out as it scouts downstream, a metallic squirt of noise like a kid's water-pistol. It's a religiously regular little corner of the bouldering world for me. The big beech tree beside the boulders is still in penitential winter garb, its bare limbs pale and its buds still tight-lipped whorls reluctant to sing any green matins just yet. Wild goats and their kids meander out of the forest onto the road, crossing the bridge in a slow pilgrimage, stopping traffic. I sit on the mat feeling the familiar hot-ache tingle from the cold morning rock, my tendons tuning up and vibrating in their parcels of flesh. Bouldering can feel very organic at times. Especially in solitude when you're working a problem or two: the adrenaline pump of a sudden tumble onto

An Eye for a Stone

Image
The finding of a hand-axe, a flint arrow, or any 'lithic artefact' wielded by our ancestors fills the lucky finder with an overwhelming sense of awe and often a rarely experienced emotion of kinship mixed with the vertigo of time. It overwhelms feelings of territory and colony, much like the astronauts report on first viewing our little blue planet from space. Even lifting them from academy storage drawers, or gazing at them behind museum glass, they command awe, respect and a light touch. They prefigure everything: survival, craft, art, technology, and we grip in our hand a stone-age hand axe exactly as we would an iPhone. The first people to arrive in Scotland after the intermittent Palaeolithic ice ages crossed into Britain across land bridges from Europe, or simply followed the coastlines up the east and west in simple seacraft, chasing rich and uninhabited territories that had recovered an unexploited flora and fauna after the ice ages. The end of the last major

Mountaineering in Scotland - Years of Change

Image
The second volume in the Scottish Mountaineering Trust's epic history of Scotting climbing - Scottish Mountaineering: Years of Change - is another essential addition to the mountaineer's bookshelf. Written by author and climber Ken Crocket, who also penned the first volume ('The Early Years'), Ken Crocket's long involvement with the SMC makes him a reliable leader in this complex territory: his attention to detail and evidence exhibits the editorial rigour these volumes require, without losing that sense of drama required for the retelling. The heady mix of legendary climbing characters who populate this volume give the narrative focus as it takes an intriguing traverse through the various clubs, 'scenes' and individuals who seemed not only to climb the best routes, but who also seemed to rope together the changing generations as Harold Raeburn and Jimmy Bell gave way to Jock Nimlin and WH Murray, who in turn passed the baton to the likes of Jimmy M

Scottish Classic Boulder Problems: Craigmaddie

Image
Thinking of the best lines in Scotland around the classic grade of 7a, which is rapidly becoming something of a warm-up for the indoor-honed youth these days, the usual qualities apply: aesthetic line, rock quality, features, moves, technique, trickery. However, sometimes not all of these need apply and the problem is classic despite being somewhat camouflaged from the standard qualities of a 'classic' boulder problem. There are many such problems at the sandstone venue of Craigmaddie where the rock quality is never perfect, the lines are generally not striking and are merged into vegetation, and to be fair many boulderers have just walked on by. But the outlook is superb and the climbing is often terrific. The best 7a at Craigmaddie? Many might say Abracadabra , but I find its lip-lunging a little repetitive and a bit morpho. My favourite would be Easyjet Direct - a butch roof problem on the higher tier which has a lie-down start in sheep shit, has no distinct 'line&

Inspiration

Image
It's an elusive juice - sporting inspiration. Athletes talk of 'form' and how difficult it is to peak to their optimum performance, as well as the mental glass ceilings they need to break through to achieve these goals. It's a lonely affair too. In the dark Scottish months when it's hard to feel motivated, some stories just show what's possible and perhaps how weak most of us are at forcing the issue (why we're happy to be bumblers!). Dave MacLeod has always inspired me, not because he is the 'strongest' climber or sends the hardest lines (he freely admits he isn't and doesn't). After a long recovery from a shoulder injury, he has just climbed Catalán Witness the Fitness which has to rank as one of the most intricate (and powerful) problems in Europe. Dave is used to roofs - he cut his teeth at Dumbarton on the likes of Pressure , and more recently the long roof problems at Arisaig Cave such as 4th Wave . Dave has written a terrific piece i

Mountains, Risk, and Volume

Image
Many volumes have been written on risk from the point of view of Economics, Evolutionary Theory, Society, etc.but risk on the hills is becoming a lot more topical with the sheer volume of people approaching mountains as something akin to 'instant freedom' from the urban world or as a monetised escape. The recent criticism of mountaineering as rich people building their CV and measures to limit ascents of Everest, for example, have brought this issue to the fore. What are our mountaineering responsibilities and rights in a 'post-exploration' world? Our author Francis Sanzaro (author of 'The Boulder'), now editor of Rock & Ice, has written an intriguing piece for the New York Times on our right to take risks in the mountains.

Boulder Scotland bouldering app

Image
We've just signed a deal with  Vertical Life  to license Stone Country guides on their terrific app. Check it out and download to  IOS or Android . Buyers of the book will soon find a stickered code inside the book which allows them a free download of the app. It's very functional, clean and easy to use, plus they have dozens of other guidebooks available to use on the app. We hope the app is available from January 2018. Those who have purchased the book already can  email us for a code to unlock the app .