Training Motivation

Fun early season sport at Kirriemuir

This time of year naturally seems to see the most psyched and virulent spell of training, with the longer days stretching our anticipation and the usual eternal optimism of the Scottish climber that this year is going to be a blinder - better train for it! Getting up to speed with the sport climbing is the usual priority and in March the crowds descend on Hamish Ted's... Is there a more popular sports climb in Scotland? I doubt it.

Personally motivation to train means I have new things to go at. Plus a three week bout of flu and migraines have left me desperate to get out or at least to train with a view to these big stones and walls awaiting the sending winds and blue sky days. As an inveterate hunter of boulders, I have a few plums tucked away in some very obscure places, though some are not so remote and I pass on as many as I keep to myself... I'd rather see folk enjoying new rock where I know the climbing is beyond me. So watch out for a few pointers soon on this blog, I'll unload a few big stones with grid refs.

It would be good to see folk exploring a bit deeper into the glens and higher up the hills - most of the big walls are known of, but I guess a boulder is now the new microcosm of personal discovery in technical climbing, maybe it was inevitable - I wonder what Cunningham and Smith and even Raeburn would have thought of it all? And is trad dead, with only the weird metaphysics of headpointing (bouldering with death) the rarified realm of a chosen few? Who knows where climbing is heading...

This year, as I struggle to get back into the harness and train to some degree of competence, bouldering is taking a back seat. I'll be touring round the sports crags and big walls of Scotland with a view to the next few publications from Stone Country.

In the meantime, I'm filling a bottle with my customised 'special' sports drink and heading to the 45 board. Circuits and circles...

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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