Skip to main content

Classic Scottish Problems No.2




Home Rule V3 6b - Dumbarton Rock

It is inevitable there will be a number of Dumby problems in any Scottish classic bouldering wish-list. As the years go by (and the layers of graffiti paint build up), this testpiece has maintained its notoriety despite the big numbers flying around. It is a simple enough direct line, rocking up on a polished edge for a frustratingly out-of-reach hand ledge, then boldly finishing up the suddenly bottomless arete on thankfully good holds. It combines technique, strength, balance, commitment and persistence: the trademark of any Dumby problem.

Redoing it brought back to me the subtlety of this problem. Due to its disproportionate polish (Dumby is after all famous for its polished slopers!), the crucial rockover edge requires a steady toe and a focused eye. The press with the left fingers on a good incut keeps the balance until the slimy pinch hold for the right hand comes into play. This hold is notorious for popping like a soap-bar and you slowly feel the tug of gravity, often snapping like a crab at the vanishing hold.
If it sticks, it allows the pressure to be placed on the toe, the leg extends, the press becomes a full-tension counterbalance - glance once at the rail (otherwise your head tilts you off-balance) and slap for it in as controlled a manner as you can with the right hand. Alternatively, fall into a lower-down edge and cross through to the good rail, though this feels more committing.

...the cigar can't be lit unless you finish up the arete. This is Dumby after all, and sometimes a good problem is supposed to give you a flutter!

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