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A Boulder

One of the joys of sitting by or on a rock is the contemplation of our time here. A boulder’s time is different to ours, something that only seeps into our consciousness with an effort of imagination – giving us a connection to something incredibly old, and much wiser. Scotland’s vast and varied basic rock set –gneiss, granites, schists, sandstones, basalts, and so on – is the simple ground rock underneath us, under all that traffic, life, and business of the world, something subsuming all our human timeframes. It appears to us as outcrops and boulders, through accidents of climate, erosion, and time. When it is a lone boulder on the landscape, some sort of pathos accompanies this isolation.  Such a boulder sits in Glen Gyle, high up under the Bealach nan Corp and facing the snout of Beinn Duchteach. It has taken me a good few hours to get here: car to Stronachlachar, bike to Glen Gyle, then a steep hike up the gravel and concrete pylon-road to the bealach. It is a boulder that enco
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Loch Lomond excursions

Climbing is deeply reassuring. Which seems odd to say, at first. There is so much anxiety around the climb, attached to anticipation, also to 'failure' and return, but when you are in the well, actually climbing, everything is as it should be – balanced. Climbing: it's not about imposing a sequence on the rock, more about accepting what choreography the rock will allow you, what it will release. It has to be studied in detail, with the body, not just the eye. Brushing and touching rock is the opening of the inner lens. The skin of the stone speaks with a deeper well of gravity and a resonance which can be felt only by touching the stone, gripping its friction, pulling into gravity's clasp and feeling that transmission of core and shaped mass. Shaped by pressure, wind, water, ice, the stone dictates its own movements from its own life. So when we boulder we are tracing something ancient rather than living any statement of the moment. Like following an invisible line or l

Vertical Landscapes: Exploring Glasgow's Hidden Bouldering

With the new guide to Glasgow Bouldering forthcoming, and with the last two years spent scouring our local landscapes for vertical diversion, many of us discovered a closer, more nuanced appreciation of climbing and how it helps maintain mental wellbeing as much as physical. The big mountains and wilderness landscapes were for the first time excluded from access and our pandemic taught us all to appreciate the landscapes on our doorstep. Even the urban world has its own small wildernesses and landscapes to immerse ourselves in for a while. For me, the daily walk in lockdown occasionally became a hunt for an esoteric piece of rock spied on the OS map or Google Earth. Rumours of boulders and mythologies of obscure rock were hunted down to help feed a hunger for the vertical. Even Dumbarton Rock was out of range, lying outside of the Glasgow City boundary. It's a venue which famously makes the blood run cold, with fiercely exposed overhanging routes, highball boulder problems and cl

New digital version of the Dumbarton Rock guide

The digital version of the Dumby guide is now available on the Issuu site at a discounted price on the print version at £9.99. This makes the guide instantly available on your mobile or tablet, just download the Issuu app and purchase - the guide will appear in your library. To get your copy, head over to Issuu here >>>

The Metadata of Being Human

Shamanistic zoomorphs, lithic graffiti, hallucinogenic tableaux, territory markings, knife-sharpeners … rock art – l'art rupestre – is so far beyond our traditional 'linguistic' history, it does not have an interpretative alphabet or a single line of confirmed meaning. There are many interpretations of the 'gravures' (carvings) and 'abris ornés' (decorated caves) in the hidden bivouacs throughout the forest of Fontainebleau. The sandstone marks easily under the nib of a hard flint from the deeper calcareous geology and this soft stone canvas has allowed our European ancestors to carve the stylised and modernistic strokes we might note as remarkable in a Picasso painting. Most of the carvings involve complex hash-marks and grids, overlaying each other, occasionally with mandala-like boxes. Sometimes there have been carved astonishingly beautiful anthropomorphs, (stylised human-like figures), or zoomorphs, (deities or humans manifesting in animal form) or argu

The Climber's Complete Guide to Dumbarton Rock

At last, the new comprehensive guide to Dumbarton Rock is here! This guide is a product of years of endeavour and a testimony to a lot of time spent under some hard rock by generational communities of climbers. It comes in at 160 pages. For one crag, that might seem excessive? But as John Hutchinson explains in his contextual introduction, the heritage of climbing at Dumby runs back six decades now (and it has a much longer social history). Brian Shields produced a handwritten guide in a Winfield notebook in the 1960s, complete with elegant topos and a list of the bouldering as well as the routes.  Brian Shields’ original notebook topo Brian Shields’ original notebook bloc topo Some of this material found its way into the SMC general guides to the Lowland Outcrops over various editions, but with the explosion of sport climbing, bouldering, and a resurgence in trad (due in no short measure to Dave MacLeod's ascent of the incredible E11 route of Rhapsody ) the Rock has become a mecc

Beinn Dòrain

           Viaduct and Beinn Dorain Once you cross the bealach under Beinn Odhar north of Tyndrum, the shapely peak of Beinn Dòrain is a visual fanfare to the Highlands. The mountain and its environs are richly detailed in the poet Duncan Ban MacIntyre’s poem Moladh Beinn Dòbhrain (‘In Praise of Beinn Dòrain’). [i] Its symmetrical convexity, deeply gullied flanks like pencil sketch-marks, and stern domed summit, make this a moment to instinctively reach for the camera. It is a steep but invigorating mountain to walk, which is more leisurely explored from its eastern corries, though the traditional ascent from Bridge of Orchy, up to the toothed ‘Am Fiachlach’ ridge quickly brings fine views from the heart of the Central Highlands, encompassing Cruachan in the west to Lawers in the east and the Mamores to the north. If you were set the task to name the features and character of this mountain, before a Gaelic toponymy, you may have come up with a similar vocabulary. Like the poem, the m