Billions of Boulders

Dominic Ward and Lee Robinson have been busy exploring the remoter possibilities of bouldering in Applecross & Torridon and they sent me some topos of new bouldering for the Stone Country Bloc-Sport Guide for the NW. There seems to be no shortage of potential and the recent good weather allowed bikini-clad walk-ins (for Lee and Lisa anyway), who found billions of boulders under the Horns of Alligin it seems... an impressive field, makes me think of that scene in the Matrix when Neo is shown the billions of cloned humans!

Nic Ward followed the attractive siren calls of the boulder field visible below the Bealach na Ba mast in Coire nan Cuileag and found the gem that is the 'Sanctuary' boulder, a good looking roof offering a little shade for tired and thirsty dogs as well as boulderers!

GR - 777 428 The boulder is NW facing, and is visible from the Applecross side of the Bealach, on the way up to the mast car park. It lies below the mast in the field of vision marking the SW end of a rock terrace and has a large white streak of lichen distinguishing it from the surrounding rock. To access either walk direct from the car park, approximately 300m across broken terrain, or walk up the mast track for 200m and cut off left down a shallow valley following one or two rock steps. The boulder marks the south western end of the largest terrace in the vicinity.

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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