Skip to main content

Industria


The first snows on the southern highlands now have a wider vista behind the the slow dismantling of the old distillery, like time being reversed. All the bricks being removed, taken away, turned back into dust and clay, buried back in the earth... and still we return to Dumbarton, dismantling the old, forging the new.

Winter has come early this November... it's bouldering weather - time to get on the slopers you couldn't hang in summer, time to enjoy the brief thrill of rubber biting into smooth basalt, sticking and allowing the torque to be applied... letting the power surge smoothly without the clutch slipping. Dave MacLeod is very close to the roof link-up under Gorilla, saying he feels way stronger than last year (!) - the body tension in him is locked taut as an Erskine bridge cable, which is the least required to maintain the rigid architecture between fingers and heels.

Dave MacLeod working 'Pressure'

Someone took a chainsaw to the old 2HB sycamore, a rather radical prune, but no doubt it will sprout back, stumpier but perennial (maybe best to get rid of the evidence, boys?). One benefit of this is that it has revealed A Ford Flash - Cubby's testpiece on the front wall of Eagle Boulder. It also allows an unobstructed sit-start to an excellent reverse problem to Dressed for Success, which is well-chalked at the minute and maybe a grade easier than the left to right version (Font 7b for the money). Consolidated is getting the attention of Richard McGhee - see his ridiulously huge span in the photo sequence, though what he makes up for in reach he loses in body tension, possibly making it all harder and a F8a proposition.

Richard McGhee on Consolidated V9

There's a good new eliminate traverse that stays dry even in atrocious weather - Shattered - which follows the lowest line of holds from the Desperado corner to a step-off under the Fever Pitch arete. The rule is simple- use the lowest holds and no high jugs for rests. It gets hard about Longbow, where a drop-down move leads to a hard cruxy sequence past the cave and under the bulge through to the arete. Dave MacLeod thought it a worthy F7c, before John Watson cheekily downgraded it to F7b+ (because he doesn't get that opportunity too often!).


Steve Richardson on 'Shattered'

In this weather, you should be getting on the slopey classics: Gorilla, Slap Happy, Consolidated, Mugsy... it all feels like a bargain at the minute! If you are down at the Rock this winter, bring a binbag or two so that when you're boosted you can collect some cans and rubbish and throw it in the skip by the stadium - there is a party culture in the Gorilla Cave at the minute and discarded Tennent's cans seem to be appearing spontaneously, as though they leave spores. It's your local world-class bouldering venue and needs a little help sometimes, you'll not see a fluorescent council jacket down here, that's for sure...

Popular posts from this blog

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...
Read more

The Lost Township of Grulin on Eigg

‘The Stony Place’ as it translates, the archaeological notes on the RCAHMS database for Eigg, state baldly the lost humanity of Grulin as early as an 1880 OS survey map: ‘…eighteen unroofed buildings, six enclosures and a field-system’. Now a scheduled monument and memorialised as a ‘depopulated settlement’, though it is not obvious if the verb is passive or aggressive, Grulin Uachdrach (Grulin Upper) is, like Hallaig on Raasay, a place of violent silence and resonance. Who lived here and why was the site abandoned? If it were not in Scotland, suspicions might fall to the climate, remoteness and apparent unsustainability of the stony place, a rabble of large rocks under the steep slopes of An Sgurr, but the carefully constructed walls tell us it was once a thriving township – the kilns, folds and blackhouse walls integrated with the giant boulders such as Clach Hosdail. In 1853 the whole of the village of Grulin, both upper and lower, housed fourteen families who were forced to l...
Read more

Timeline Walks of Scotland #Hallaig to Screapadal on Raasay

'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...
Read more