Purple Patches in Nevis and Aberdeen

Saturn Crack 7c (FA Dave MacLeod Feb 2008,)

I used to see Dave MacLeod all the time at Dumby, if I was out for an hour at this time of year, he'd be under some dark roof, beavering away at a new sequence on another new line. It was odd to be walking through the gorge at Glen Nevis last Friday, on my way to the remote Meanach bothy for a night with 5kg coal and some city-dissolving spirit when I spied Dave hunkering under a boulder in the gorge, tripod on the path to film another first ascent of a classic bouldering line! Claire was wrapped in duvet, busy being photographer and Dave had just climbed the oft-spied crack line on the large boulder blocking the top of the gorge by the Meadows. A superb-looking layback sequence on this smooth rock gains the blank scoop on the front face where the crack dies out, from here tenuous slopers and blind feet proved the crux above a landing of precariously-balanced pads. Dave thought it a superb Font 7c and one for the connoisseurs of European-style boulder problems. He named it 'Saturn Crack'.

Optimus Prime SS, Pic courtesy Neil Morrison

Meanwhile, in the north east, at Cammachmore, Tim Rankin upped the bar significantly by adding a sit start to his recent prow problem Optimus Prime, as well as adding a good technical line on the wall to the left of it. Tim says:

'Thought you would like to know I sent the sitting start to Optimus Prime today... I can only say it is a good bit harder than the standing and linking it once I could do all the moves proved a lot harder than I expected! What I would say though is it's the finest bouldering feature I have climbed anywhere in Scotland with quality climbing to match! I also did the SDS to the very high ball wall just left of it which I did the standing to the week before last. Megatron is bigger then Optimus Prime but not as hard and probably worth E5 without a spotter!'

Megatron V5 (6c+)
The undercut wall left of 'Optimus Prime ' started with right hand on arete and left on a high good crimp. Use good hidden crimp to gain obvious hand rail then edge of little hanging groove to gain the top, higher than it is hard an excellent problem. SDS V7 (7a+) as Optimus Prime but swing left around the arete to gain the standing start crimp.

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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