Not to everyone's taste, this great little crag is a little mossy and north facing (dank in winter, midgy and humid in summer), but it does have a selection of fine technical boulder problems. It is one of my favourite spots when conditions are right, such as in June this year, when the long dry spells crisped the moss off the rock. I've put a PDF guide on the Boulder Scotland website, or click on the link below and print out. Unfortunately the humid July rains have returned the crag to a slippy, mossy jungle, best wait for the weather to dry again before a visit.
‘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...