Wake Up and Have Your Corncrakes

Wake Up and Have Your Corncrakes - Mull bouldering

I came to Mull to further scope out the fine bouldering around Fionnphort on the pink granite walls, one of which contributed the template to our own Scottish Climbs website. This is a place for summer bouldering, meandering between perfect walls and slabs, dancing along the beflowered crisp machair, climbing to the endless accompanimant of skylarks and corncrakes (by 5 in the morning these were 'bloody corncrakes').

Fionnphort is idyllic for long roaming sesssions of climbing in the easy movement and sudden puzzling positions into which granite slabs lure you... the climbing is either enjoyable or simply impossible due to the blank and rounded nature of the slabby domes. Here and there are some good cracklines and the occasional nodule pokes out to provide a resting foothold or a thankful hand feature. Most of the time the body is poised on fulcrums of balance, hoping the granite crystals won't crumble, or you piano-finger larger crystals to inch over that mantle.

There are hundreds of short solo walls and crags awaiting the bolder boulderer, around Kintra just to the north and at Erraid and Fidden to the south. Listen out for the famous corncrakes - you can't mistake them... they sound like some hopeless car-jacker touching two live wires together - krek krek! krek krek!

I've put a topo of a fun 'yellow' level circuit on my main website on the topo page.

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

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