3D Dumby blocs - a new beginning

What is the future of climbing topos and guides? It's a question which has been evolving rapidly in the last decade as we get more and more used to accessing data online, or viewing topos on our phones or tablets. Guidebooks, like vinyl records, are collectable objects and still useful and resilient formats for getting the beta you need.The Youtube/Vimeo revolution has changed bouldering beta for good and a realtime topo might include a video, a description, and, perhaps now a 3D model of the boulder.

In collaboration with the Glasgow-based ACCORD project, we've been exploring the conceptual and practical challenges (and the usefulness) of exploring our sporting heritage in a 3D-modelling project. This has involved collaborative approaches to record the climbing and geology at Dumbarton Rock. The history of climbing at Dumbarton is now rich enough, and has built up enough generational layers of development, that a statement of intent has to be made in terms of voicing our heritage here. Historic Scotland has been proactive in listening to the climbing community, but it really took this summer's project with the Glasgow School of Art/RCAHMS and local climbers to recognise Dumbarton Rock as a valuable community heritage to place alongside the castle heritage and the community/industrial heritage on the banks of the River Leven by the Rock. The SMC and the MCOS have always dutifully recorded the history and routes at Dumbarton, and represented its climbers nationally, but this project is motivated by bringing climbing into the community as an integral part of its local history.

To see the work and projects we have initiated, you can download a sample bloc (the Sea Boulder) here, you just need Adobe Reader to play around with it. Let me know if the download link and the 3D works for you, we want to make these models freely available under Creative Commons >>>

(Note - the 3D model won't appear in your browser preview, so click the Dropbox download button and open in the latest version of Acrobat)

Sea Boulder 3D model in Acrobat PDF

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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