Scottish Bouldering

The caves at Cullen have seen some recent activity by John Brown who has an excellent set of photos on his Flickr site.

He climbed the entrance wall of the main cave, giving the new problem 'Cullen Skank', which wins my award for the best name so far this year!

Cullen Skank Font 7a FA John Brown 2009
St Loraine Black Lady's cavern (the one just behind St Duane's cave) - just to the right of the graffiti naming the cave. Standing start in a small slot and slopey crimp, up and vaguely right to finish high on two small crimps.

In Glen Nevis, Alan Cassidy was sheltering from a storm when he found a real bouldering gem in ahidden roof. After a quick brush and clean-up, he sent it down at 7b or thereabouts in his words, so expect some big power moves! Well worth seeking out apparently - look forward to finding it, Alan - I must have walked past it dozens of times!

The Hurricane Shelter Font 7b *** FA Alan Cassidy Jan 2009
On the path up to Sky Pilot, just above Cavalry Crack buttress. there is a flat grassy area. Above this is a large boulder forming a cave above a rocky ramp. This problem starts at the obvious blocky feature low on the the right and climbs the arete/lip in its entirity. Half way along the lip a tree forces a powerful reach to a good but sharp hold in the roof from where the lip can be regained (crux) and followed to a nice mantel out left.

Recently decanted from Ireland to Scotland, Pierre Fuentes, who writes a good blog, has been visiting the good and bad Scotland has to offer in terms of stones, though he's yet to visit the Northwest which bleaches out all else! Anyway, he thought Clova the highlight of the East Coast, maybe it's the homesickness for Glendalough and all those clustered stones? He reported one new problem, and thought maybe the grading needs revised overall... probably my own problems!

'Glen Clova was by far the best place in my opinion. Lots of cool problems in a beautiful valley full of silly sheep. Really great. It reminded me so much of Glendalough in Wicklow. We did most of the lines in the guidebook plus a few other ones that seem to have been cleaned. Also added a cool rockover on a boulder that's standing on top of another one (looks like a guy with a hat, video attached.) My brother called it the Bulgarian Lift, probably 6b although the grades there seem to be very soft.'

Pierre did a good introduction to Targassonne in France, available here at TheShortSpan.

In the Northwest, Richie Betts repeated Dave MacLeod's excellent sloper problem 'Changed Days' on the Russell Boulder at Applecross Kishorn. Here's the video:

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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