Dumbarton Spring 2007

Sanction - Dave Macleod, BNI Boulder -Font 8b

It's been an early start at Dumbarton and folk are making progress, I'm very close to bagging my long term nemesis that is Pongo SS, but the weather has turned wet again and this problem is a weeper - figuratively and literally...

however, I heard that Malcolm Smith made the second ascent of Pressure while Dave MacLeod completed the roof section of his project on the BNI boulder - Sanction is the left side of the roof (Sabotage the right) which is a hard Font 8b, the link-up through the Perfect Crime start will make it Dumby's hardest...

Meanwhile, Alan Cassidy despatched King Kong - a frustrating Font 8a which is very easy to fail on at the last moves. 'Justice!' is Cassidy's comment on the whole affair! Michael Lee is also making progress on the Consolidated traverse, so we should watch for him eating through the grades...

Michael Lee working the end of Consolidated

On a weirder note, Dumbarton it seems is threatened by flood-tides, the driftwood each year (this includes girder-size planks, slabs of sheet iron and the usual flotilla of Tennent's cans...) is rising higher and higher, it is maybe pertinent to imagine that these boulders will one day be underwater? Would make Pongo a bit easier, with a snorkel...

Sinking! - Pic by Dave MacLeod

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...

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...

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...

Stone Country

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