Full Circle on the Munros

I still haven't bagged them all and I guess I don't feel that urge or itch - just being on the flanks of hills, in the bowels of corries, in deep lush gorges with no escape, in echoey stone shoots, or buffeted on the steep faces of rock, it doesn't matter to me where I am on the hill, I'm just happy to be out, like the stag who knows there are parts of the mountain for every season. The summit is for a peculiar kind of beast and the odd and very British fad for Munro bagging is now a kind of institutionalised fever that is as popular as ever.

So what does a climber do when it rains, or tweaks a tendon, or is just sore and old...? Go for a walk...

I would recommend getting a good Munro guide and stomping around a few, you'll enjoy it and I guarantee you'll find some new rock. I was on Aonach Beag recently and was delighted to discover a tremendous face of rock high on the hill with only a handful of routes on it and in the corrie a host of largely untouched boulders (which I pawed as a zealot would a gold idol).

So what's the best guide to fit in a glove box or pack for that lost day? I was kindly sent a new edition of the excellent and essential rucsac guide: 'The Munro Almanac', largely rewritten by Neil Wilson who publishes under the InPinn imprint though the guide still sports a foreword by Cameron McNeish (and a dayglo'd younger self on the cover). This is still an excellent pocket summary and perfect for the likes of me who prefer to bag a Munro more accidentally than on purpose. Quite amusingly, after over a 100 years and the continual minutiae of promotion and demotion, the list has come full circle to Munro's original total of 283 peaks...

A copy can be picked up for 7.99 here...support your Glasgow independent publishers!

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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