Requiem for a Boulder Mat

It must be an age thing, but I found myself ogling new bouldering mats online, in preparation for patio-ing out my autumn project, when I just realised, jeez, I had another mat already. It was up in the Coilessan boulderfield, hidden under a roof. Was it? Or was I losing it? Bloody hell, how long ago was that, I thought? Three years? Oh well, best stomp up, hunt around in the hope of retrieving it, in whatever state it had been left by the Scottish elements. I seemed to remember leaving it under a steep project prow, fully intending to come back the next weekend... it was old and manky then, what hope for it now?

The plan was to do a good 10km stomp-around anyway, for it was way too hot for a bracken-fighting, tick-picking bouldering session, so losing some weight seemed like a good idea. I ran up the track for a couple of km, found the white post, stomped up through the 'bastard' tussocks and made a beeline for the giant boulderfield. Just getting here with a mat earns a 7a, I think - especially when the vegetation is in full camouflage outfit in July. This is a place with more projects than completed problems, you'll see why when you get lost in the maze of gullies, trapdoors, chasms, roofs and prows - lots to come back to, maybe, but I always get here bushed, too hot and scared to death of the man-eating nature of the place. Jesus, even the horseflies were oversized, military-spec monsters!

I found a few more good landings and nice leaning walls, then found my mat, wedged like a geo-cached mattress between two boulders. It was UV'd to a sickly white, spotted with fungus and when I pulled out the foam, a flurry of confetti and scurrying mice disappeared into the blaeberries. Munched to death!

I stuffed in what was left of the guts of the smelly, damp old Dropzone and carted it penitentially over the castle-cragged Cnoc Coinnich and back down to Glen Coilessan.

If anyone knows a good seamstress and upholsterer, let me know...

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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