Skip to main content

Garheugh Port

Seam problemSlabs againThe slabs font 3 problemMain cragScream slabStates boulder roof side
CragsThe Mantelbarndoor crack on manky boulderLong slab south endSplit boulderSnowhite area
The Long SlabGarheugh PortSheep Pen wallAfterlife slabShort left to right traverseSuck my woolie roof
Shadow Dancer 6b is the wave washed slopers and arete in the middleDon King direct 6a a great wee problemMike's Traverse Garheugh pic Dave MacLeodmikeSnowWhitemikestatestrav_BOyster 2 trim
Garheugh Port, a set on Flickr.
It's been a long time since Garheugh Port first attracted the boulderer, around the millennium in fact, when Dave Redpath, nursing a pulley injury, went exploring on the Galloway coast for some diversion...

'It was by chance that I pulled out an old guidebook, flicking through I happened to come across a place described as having a steep undercut slab and a few boulders. . .'

Sounded promising... Dave disappeared every weekend until a batch of superb problems on the greywacke rock of Garheugh was completed. It became a popular summer venue for bouldering the highball slabs in the sun and sea breeze, a good winter venue for catching low winter sun and holding the roof slopers. It saw a host of visits by excited central belters until it seemed to fade back to nature, as many Scottish venues tend to do when they have their moment and are left to slumber. I returned on the hottest day of the year on the 3rd of June - a real continental scorcher, southern air masses having drifted too far north. I was expecting to see ivy and lichen covering the slabs, but thankfully most of the classic problems were clean and there was even a little chalk here and there. Someone had built a rather fetching rock cairn from the flat echoey stones that litter the storm beach. Perfect day for getting the top off and sweating it out in the baking heat as seals slopped about in the weedy slackness of low tide...

It's located on the western foreshore of the Machars peninsula between Port William and Glenluce.
Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

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...
Read more

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...
Read more

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...
Read more