Jacksonville Royale

What is the finest hillfood in Scotland?

You will have your own favourites. I guess it's all about the situation - how battered you are, how thirsty or simply how hungover. You will have gathered this is not a post for you muesli-munching banana-peelers who demure at the sight of amber bottles and frying pans.

Two days in Glencoe absorbing some fine and traditional weather alike leads to different conclusions on this. A wet day of sleety rain with sodden feet frozen from bare-footing it through a frozen river or two (cursing the forgotten wellies) and I'd murder a flask of French Onion soup for some reason. The end of a sweaty walk-in and the blue Power-ades work a treat for the thirst. Babybel cheeses seem inordinately fun to unwrap in a private moment - little parcels of chewy cheese that remind me of 'No-Entry' signs as you unpeel the wax strip.

Or winegums found congealed together in the bottom of your chest pocket (with glove fluff) are the best for winter belays, I'm convinced on that one.

In the evening, stuck in the bothy and choking on a stuttering fire, the sound of a primus coming to life and a can of beer cracking is mighty close to perfection.

Or the first pint in the Kingy and a bowl of salted chips. Brown or red sauce according to which Scottish city you hanker for the most.

And the breakfast of champions? Two Lorne sausage 'squaries' interleaved with the cheapest, most orange Kraft cheese slices (melted to a fondue consistency on a high heat), squeezed between two flattened wholemeal rolls (the healthy concession). I will have to add the caveat that they taste better after beer than before.

Long live the Jacksonville Royale...

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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