February bouldering

With the high pressure settling over most of Scotland and providing windless weather and cold temperatures, the bouldering conditions are pretty good at the start of February. Some new projects are being worked on across the country.

On the Moray Coast, a new sandstone roof venue akin to Cummingston looks excellent, if this little video is to go by, thanks to Hamish Fraser, Dave Wheeler and friends.

New Bouldering Project, Moray Coast from Hamish Fraser on Vimeo.

In Glasgow, Serious Climbing is putting the finishing design touches to the Commonwealth Games legacy project that is the Cuningar Loop Boulder Park. This park is due to open in the spring sometime, and first glimpses look jaw-dropping. The site features what appears to be about a dozen moulded blocs on a forested plot of land in a loop of the Clyde river, near Dalmarnock.

Alex Gorham has blogged a picture of a nicely-cleaned sandstone bloc near Milngavie, hopefully we'll have some hard projects to work soon when he reveals where. The sandstone escarpment that runs under the Campsies from Faifley to Lennoxtown has a number of undeveloped spots, dank roofs and lost blocs, often requiring significant cleaning, but this looks like another belter to rival the Lennoxtown roof.

Kintyre has seen some exploration round Carradale, where a tortured schist geology provides unusually juggy steep climbing and some giant highballs.

In Arrochar, a number of large blocs have been discovered recently, with Dan Varian about to reveal an awesome hidden bloc sure to be a new classic in the area. John Watson has been developing some new areas in remoter parts, just waiting for the elusive combination of conditions and form ...

In Coigach, it seems slabs are the fashion of the day, perhaps because they are so often ignored due to the profligate ubiquity of roofs and steepness on the sandstone. 'Flexor Strain' is the 'hardest slab in Coigach':

Nigel Holmes looking for holds on the Coigach slabs...

Flexor Strain from North West Outdoors on Vimeo.

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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