April Bouldering News

Chahala sit start Font 8a

I guess I'll add a lot more to this when I get some more news but while I was away in Chile, some more big numbers were graffiti'd to Dumbarton: Dave succeeded on the oft-attempted sit start to Chahala...Font 8a! Lots of body tension, finger strength, clamping and wild throwing required. Dave also added a new sitter under the Mugsy headwall called Set in Motion at 7c+ though you might need the holds pointed out, it seems to share holds with Spam. Anyway, well done to Dave for a rich vein of bouldering form over the season! He also repeated Kayla at Portlethen, which makes it the fourth after Tim Rankin, Luke Fairweather and Niall McNair? Methods and grades apparently vary from 7c to 8a... all a stramash of numbers really, let's just say the line is good and it's nails!!

DaveMacLeod on his own 'Set In Motion' 7c+ at Dumby

Chris Graham has been busy cleaning up the open dot projects from the Stone Country book...I deliberately added a few project lines to encourage people to do them and Chris certainly has been putting the book out of date faster than I can write a new edition! He rattled off the 7c's of The Sword at Morar, Out of the Blue at Loch Lomond and now a fine V7 roof line at the Corrie boulders, see the video below. The right hand line is still to go, and there is also a V5 version of this problem using the prop boulder underneath and travelling left on jugs to a shot-hole finish. More details on Arran coming soon.

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

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

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