Stone Country Bouldering Movies and Topos

I'm just updating the main website www.stonecountry.co.uk with new material, including lots of topos that didn't make the new guide (eg. The Whangie is downloadable in Pdf A4 format on the Clyde page), as well as lots of recent new movie clips of classic problems. I'll continue to add more material to the site to complement and update the Stone Country Guide to Bouldering in Scotland, which is just about to be published and can be advance ordered from the Books page or the Paypal link on the sidebar - you benefit from Freepost if you order now!

There'll also be a launch for the new guide in Glasgow at the end of March, along with a preview of the new Bouldering in Scotland movie by Pete Murray -'Elements' - which will feature some of the best venues and hardest problems in the country, as well as some insightful exploration into the various 'elements' which all go into making bouldering adventurous, magical and meaningful in Scotland.

The Whangie Bouldering - Fingaripper Font 6a

So the weather has become spring-like and perfect for bouldering, a time to get to your favourite places if you can escape work! The Whangie is a beautiful place to hang out when the weather is like this, yesterday I had a full cloud inversion with only the distant peaks of Ben Lomond, Ben Vorlich etc. joining me in the clear blue air above the mist. I did the circuit of the best problems here, which I've topo'd for the curious on the main site, with about 14 quality independent problems up to font 6c+. Attached is a wee video of the excellent new problem 'Rune Wall'.

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

Stone Country

Search This Blog