As the Days Lengthen...

Not Scotland... Punta Grande Patagonia

An old woman in Ullapool stopped me in the street over New Year and said 'As the days lengthen, the cold strengthens...' and she shook me by the elbow like it was some portent of doom. But she is quite right and the old saying rings true in Scotland... as the days stretch imperceptibly in January we tend to get a cold moist period with high level snows, it seems the hills will be freeze- thawing this month, quite nicely thankyou very much. So in between sessions at the local wall trying to get some fitness for the year, I've dug out my old battered Quasar axes and will be sharpening them with anticipation of days like these photos.

Salamander Gully

Crest Route, Glencoe

I've always felt that winter days can provide the rarest quality mountain experience in all the climbing disciplines. They are usually the most memorable because your senses are sharpened by proximate mortality, freezing your ass on belays, torture-rack hotaches, smashing your nose in with the adze or some such lesson of the snows...

The odds of a perfect blue day that you recall so inaccurately are generally the romantic distillate of abandoned days, poor conditions, getting lost in blizzards, forgetting your harness, scraping off onto a Grade 3, abbing from a shoogly peg because there's 'nae gear'...there's never enough gear in winter, it's all a con(fidence) game!

Beinn an Dothaidh Ice

So why the hell do we do it? Simply because it's a challenge, it shakes us out of the lazy lethargy and comfortable numbness of city life and mod-cons. Nothing like getting up at 4am because you're too gripped and cold for another hour's kip, then walking in through sleet in the vain hope the blizzard will clear to blue skies and perfect chewy ice...

just sometimes though...

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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