Stone Country Reviews

We are gearing up a little for Christmas and providing a few offers if anyone is looking for gifts for that keen boulderer!

All items can be bought securely through the STONE COUNTRY SHOP :

Stone Play - The Art of Bouldering £19.95

'The prints excellently portray the many aspects of bouldering, from aggression, technicality and confusion, to calm, subtlety and mastery. The essays complement the prints, taking the reader into the minds of some of bouldering's main protagonists – old and new. Overall this is a thought-provoking book for any climber, prompting personal reflection on one's own style, attitude and habits.'

Dave Redpath

Free additional T-Shirt with each T-Shirt order (£9.99) ie. two for a tenner!!

Stone Country Edition 1 - NOW ONLY £9.99 !!

Free draw - win the new Bouldering Guide!!

The new full colour edition of Stone Country will be available by February 2008, and I'll be entering everyone who gets in touch in a draw to win a free copy, deadline is Dec 31st 2007.

Just send an email with your name and address to boulderscotland@gmail.com

Also in the shop, I'll be selling more guidebooks and DVD's. To start with, there's Pete Murray's Chains at £16.99... Pete is currently working on a new film which will beavailable through Stone Country in 2008. Pete always provides an intelligent angle on our climbing world, showing us that there is deeper meaning and personal politics to our obsessions in climbing...

I was also sent a copy of the new Hotaches film Committed Vol.1 and enjoyed it thoroughly... it was another palm-wringing adventure through extreme British trad climbing and I hope it is the start of a fine documentray tradition of DVD's from the Hotaches crew. The production was excellent, the routes jaw-dropping and some of the fall footage is becoming legendary... these should come with an X-rated warning that you will spoil yourself, especially the footage of Meshuga in the new film! Congratualtions to Dave and Paul and the crew for continuing a high-quality independent film company... it's a hard shift traveling and producing and editing those thousands of minutes of footage - they deserve our attention and a little of our Christmas money! The film (and the excellent E11 movie are both available through their website).

Next year will see a busy production schedule for Stone Country guides. We'll have local bouldering guides, individual area topos available laminated and online, as well as Pete Murray's new bouldering movie. There will also be a guide to a European venue and quite possibly a collection of essays on Scottish Traditional climbing... so keep checking back on the blog.

Let's hope for a cold, crisp, sloper-sticky Christmas and New Year.

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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