'Bouldering in Ireland' published!

I received a copy of Dave Flanagan's long-anticipated guide to Bouldering in Ireland and it is obvious from the first flick-through that this is one of the most stunningly produced bouldering guides out there! It is simply slabber-inducing and the sense of adventure jumps off each page. Some of the rock, such as the Fermanagh Brimstones and Loch Dan granite, looks superb and the growing plethora of coastal and mountain venues means a round-trip would fill a very long summer...

The guide is designed on the popular landscape format which allows the clear mapping room to breathe, as well as framing 2-page photo-location spreads to clarify the 'glen clusters' typical of Celtic landscape bouldering. The classic areas such as Glendalough and Carrickfinn are well documented and it was good to see the Fair Head chaos well mapped and represented for the north of Ireland.

It is packed with bright photos and the route descriptions are deliberately spare and modelled on the 7+8 Font guide, but accompanied by clear photo topos, which means you work out the problem for yourself once you're guided to it, which is how it should be - a guidebook should both be inspiring and useful in getting you to where the photo was taken; this guide seems to be just the ticket.

Dave has been very generous in keeping the price as low as 18 Euro, which is a miracle of publishing - I guess sponsorship and his own generous funding made this possible, so we should be thankful that this guide is such tremendous value for a full colour production at 255 pages. I can only commend Dave on a fantastic creation and a book to treasure!

You can buy it on TheShortSpan...

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

Loch Lomond excursions

Climbing is deeply reassuring. Which seems odd to say, at first. There is so much anxiety around the climb, attached to anticipation, also to 'failure' and return, but when you are in the well, actually climbing, everything is as it should be – balanced. Climbing: it's not about imposing a sequence on the rock, more about accepting what choreography the rock will allow you, what it will release. It has to be studied in detail, with the body, not just the eye. Brushing and touching rock is the opening of the inner lens. The skin of the stone speaks with a deeper well of gravity and a resonance which can be felt only by touching the stone, gripping its friction, pulling into gravity's clasp and feeling that transmission of core and shaped mass. Shaped by pressure, wind, water, ice, the stone dictates its own movements from its own life. So when we boulder we are tracing something ancient rather than living any statement of the moment. Like following an invisible line or l

Stone Country

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