Donegal Bouldering and Tweed's Port

A week in Donegal in late August is a dolly-mixture of weather. It certainly meant wind and the tent spent most of the week flattened under an invisible thumb of constant pressure. The bouldering around Dawros Head and Tramore is always interesting, with the sand levels playing tricks with your memory. The Tramore dunes have grown, for example, and totally covered one nice wall I used to enjoy as I couldn't for the life of me find it again. I felt suitably small, thinking how casually our efforts are buried by wind and time. It was no different for the neolithic and bronze age folk - a large finger of granite, which was once pointed on a hill as a marker or territory post, has lain buried for millennia by a giant sand dune which is only now walking its way east and revealing the top of the blinded stone.

However, Marmalade Rock in Loughros has some nice problems on walls and orange quartz, with the coves at Rosbeg providing some good steep, sea-worn schist, though mostly the the wind played tiddliwinks with my mats. And in Donegal chalk balls run away like tumbleweeds if you drop them... there is nothing more embarrassing than chasing a chalk ball down a beach, with rock shoes on...

I stopped off on the ferry home at Larne to climb on the big bloc at Tweed's Port, just north of Larne past Carfunnock park (no fun at all and full of squealing kids). I'm sure the locals have climbed on it, but it has four worthy aspects over a shore which needs heavy matting. The straight up lines are all fairly easy, on the four cardinal aspects. The east slabs tiptoe easily up over the tides when full. There is a south roof which provides some sit starts up to 6a and a a traverse of the west and south face is a good 6c if kept low. The meat of the bloc is a beautiful sea-worn north wall with what looks like some harder projects. I'd be keen to know of established problems if locals have climbed here, it's certainly the most accessible of blocs!

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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