New Guide to Arrochar and Cowal

The new Blocsport Guide to Arrochar and Cowal is now available as a 16 page full colour PDF download for only 3.50. It is a guide to the best bouldering and sport climbing between Arrochar and the Cowal peninsula. It is a precursor chapter to the new area guides from Stone Country, so if you purchase a copy of the PDF please let us know if there are additions or inaccuracies and we'll correct for the print issues. Also, we are seeking photographs for the new print guides, so if you have any good sample jpegs send them through and we'll consider for inclusion (free guide if you are included).

The contents list goes as follows:

1. Ardvorlich Sports Crags including Hidden Walls & Quarterdome

2. Loch Sloy Blocs

3. The Narnain Boulders

4. Glen Croe Blocs

5. Kennedy Boulder

6. Coilessan Blocs and projects

7. Glen Kinglas , the Restil boulders and the Butterbridge Bloc

8. The Anvil Sport Climbs!!

9. Tighnabruaich Sport Climbs at the Viewpoint crags

10. Glen Massan House Bloc and Miracle Wall sport near Dunoon

Remember, select the highest quality option on your printer, use good paper and select the 'Print as Booklet' option - this will print the guide as a handy A5 portrait booklet which you can staple.

Enjoy your climbing and I look forward to some feedback on new routes and problems!

Sample pages:

Open publication - Free publishing - More scotland

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

Search This Blog