Magic in the Trossachs

'Hocus Pocus' at the Ben A'an Boulders

Acutely aware of the fragility of our weather, I took the opportunity to give myself a little time off from books and films to disappear into the Trossachs at a remote and silent venue away from the crowds... the unlikely bouldering venue of Ben A'an. A fine enough venue for trad climbing and soloing the excellent tiers of schist (now a little polished!), it was a surprise to come across an excellent boulder in a sunny cluster under the lowest crags. The bracken was crisp and flattened, the air was cool and the sun warmed my back... the blue sky rang like a bell... you don't let these days escape if you can help it!

I had done a few problems on the boulders here before, including a nice 6c through the Magic Tree boulder's roof, but this was really an escape from a line I was too weak to hold last visit. This time I felt a little stronger and attacked it quickly before the sun warmed the quartzy crimps and slopers too much and before my skin deteriorated. The direct went a little quicker than I expected and a little easier than I imagined. It's basically a sit start to a shelfed overhang, using a strong heel hook to gain a poor lip pinch, then it twists and crosses through on excellent crimps and slopers to a crux sequence on toe smears to gain the finishing rockover sequence... all in all a magical problem and worth the walk up the hill. Hocus Pocus Font 7a is by far the best problem here, I added a super direct at maybe 7b but the original method proved the more aesthetically satisfying (something you can muck about with in bouldering that maybe you can't on a route). The boulder is located down the hill 200 metres at the first burn once you clear the forest, before the hike up to the summit of Ben A'an, well below the trad crags. There are a dozen or so problems, mostly in the Font 5 to 6b range.

The weather is about to turn, it's been a good couple of weeks for the bouldering community... lots of new problems for everyone. We got some great film footage, 'Elements' will be here 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...

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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