Bouldering rampage Scotland-style

I hate the term 'rampage', as though boulderers are locusts devouring some resource and moving on, it's an awful term and I'll talk about it in another post, but it's maybe an apt term to explain the pent-up energy released when weather and new blocs coincide in Scotland. Cabin-fever can lead to a frenzy of sudden activity after the long winter months, on boulders so good they crave movement and release themselves.

We've had a good spell of weather recently (now over!) and the usually dank blocs have dried out. I won't release any location details out of respect for the hard-working and civic-minded pioneers, but the Highlands in particular have always held project stones generally ignored by the global bouldering community, maybe they have good reason. If they want 8c's and 9a's, they are here for the taking, though we're hoping some home-grown talent finds a way to move Scotland onto new levels. After all, this is the home of Malc Smith and Dave MacLeod, amongst others, who have somehow found international levels of strength and grace on rock, despite the weather!

Here are a few tasters of Scottish bouldering stones currently in development, if you do stumble on stones with chalk and cleaning marks, please respect the projects, though it's unlikely you'll find these stones without a highly developed radar which only kicks in when you've lived in Scotland for a while ... or you have something to trade!

Hige Girvan bloc awaiting a low tide...'USS Enterprise'

New Traverse from Pierre Fuentes at Agassiz Rock 7b+

Pierre's new traverse at Salisbury - 7a

This giant arete sits in someone's garden unfortunately...

Loch Lomond giant awaiting someone strong...

Giant roof with a possible 9a for someone who likes huge spans...Pierre Philosophale but harder

Colin Lambton on the Aberfoyle project bloc, coming soon...

Dan Varian near Strontian...on the project bloc

Tom Charles-Edwards on his Arran project

One of the giant blocs at 'Mini Magic Wood', details from Alex Gorham forthcoming

Glasgow sandstone bloc topo to be released soon...

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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