Fontainebleau High Pressure

Ever since we did the Essential Fontainebleau guide, I have been overcome with a sense of dread that doing guides for this forest is putting far too much pressure on it, a bit like the woodcutters of the 19th century who paradoxically opened the unusually featured rocks to the the light and the painters of the Barbizon school...

I'm not the only one doing guides, or chopping down the mystery of the forest, there seem to be dozens now - for cycling, walking and bouldering. A point-in-case is the new Fun Bloc by Jingo Wobbly, the methodology being to squeeze as much out of the forest as possible in 320 pages and coming close to being the definitive 'tick-it-all' guide (but missing the point of the whole affair?).

Then there is the cool, remote, and minimalist approach (my favourite) of Bart van Raaj's 7+8 and 5+6 guides, beautifully crafted works which allow you to discover the forest more intuitively and leave you to do what bouldering is all about - working it out for yourself (though the maps do a super job of getting you in position in the first place). The classic Montchausse guide is now in a clean new edition, and the Off-Piste guide is still useful, though the recent development of new sectors makes it a little out of date. The Versante Sud guides are a mess and less said the better, and I haven't seen the big German guide yet, does it come with a free VW camper?

Anyway, it's unlikely I'll be rushing to do a new edition of EF (Essential Fontainebleau) as there's enough out there and I think the forest could do with a break from foreigners 'milking it', as is the perception of many locals. Though EF was designed to be a short 'ethical' guide to appreciating the forest for Brits - and how to enjoy it responsibly, like a wee dram, rather than binging stupidly on the blocs as though it's a supermarket-sweep of grades and benchmarks to be navigated like Ikea - it still pointed a fat go-to finger at a delicate area. If any guide needs produced, it's one with a stronger sense of the history and quietude of the forest. Chuntering hordes of gym-monkey youths on uni-club trips are an unfortunate side-effect of our bouldering culture, its commodification swamping the forest in a noise of social-media twittering and Hulk howls.

Well, rant over, as it's not that bad and it's a big forest. It's still easy to find solitude and get away from it all. The English/US mentality of 'developing' a problem or sector might be the wrongly-chosen word for what the French call 'opening' a problem or area. I prefer 'opening' ('ouvrir'), as it also suggests we move on and the forest closes around again, which is the natural way of it all I hope.

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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