Great Climbing Films

Climbing is really quite easy to do but notoriously hard to film. Anyone who has been involved in making even a small production of their own realises the logistical difficulties and the problem of making climbing 'interesting' - watching climbers move slowly over a rock face is a rather disembodied experience. And how on earth do you make movies about alpine climbs?!

I was thinking of the 'great' climbing movies (pointedly ignoring 'Cliffhanger') and my thoughts ran back to the excellent thriller The Eiger Sanction with Clint Eastwood and George Kennedy made during the Cold War hysteria in 1975. Since then there have been a few notable high-profile films such as the rather corny 1991 'mountain-buddy' movie K2, the superb Touching the Void by Kevin MacDonald in 2003 and now I think we have the best yet in 2009 - the superb Nordwand (North Face) directed by Philipp Stolzl.

Nordwand relates the tragic chain of events in July 1936 which led two talented German climbers (Toni Kurz and Andi Hinterstoisser) close to the first ascent of the Eiger north face, before turning back to help fellow climbers. The slowly unfolding tale of small errors and fateful combinations eats away at their goal as they try to ascend the mountain. Avalanches and rockfall and exposure threaten them all while the world's media looks on in macabre glee at the unfolding tale of tragedy through the hotels' telescopes. A well-crafted movie with great characterisation and a real feeling of exposure in the action sequences, with the constant ringing of hammered pitons in the background, this movie captures the ambiguous motivations of mountaineering but ends suitably with the purity of some climbers' sacrifices.

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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