New Bouldering Summer 07

Lee Robinson on 'Soap', Trossachs

Despite the bracken, the heat and the midges, boulderers continue to find new stuff around the country... Richie Betts is busy developing Duntelchaig with Dave Wheeler, Lee Robinson and Craig Henderson did a couple of new lines on the Fight Club boulder at the Trossachs: the best being the 'Soap' dyno at about V3 which is a direct line through the start of Fight Club (Lee named this after the bar of soap they make out of human fat in the film, yecchhh) and BBT V4, the wall right of Fight Club from a hard move off the flatty (Craig named this after Meat Loaf's character in the film!).

Ross Henighen repeated the full hard version of In Bloom at Dumby (7c), a good effort in the warm season as the rock gets impossible to handle this time of year!

Richie Betts has topos developed for the next Stone Country Companion to Bouldering in Scotland - check out my main site local map for some easter egg draft topos to Kessock boulders Inverness (conglomerate!), as well as Carn Liath on Skye (thanks to Lee Robinson) and Kev Howett's Glen Lednock and Ben Ledi guides in Perthshire...

Richie did an excellent-looking new V6 Font 7a called The Dagger at Duntelchaig, the vid makes this look a future classic... Richie, you've a good eye and obviously good knee-technique!!

I'm sure more areas will be developed this year and look out for some hot autumn action when conditions cool down, especially Glen Nevis now Dave MacLeod has decanted to Fortwilliam! Tim Rankin has a few big lines in the NE as well. The Southern Highlands have a few good lines to go yet, and continue to throw up classic schist bouldering in odd places. A gritstone venue will even be revealed if we can formalise access.

As for the meantime, I'm going into the mountains as they dry out over the summer...

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...

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