Boulder Scotland - 3rd edition now published

The new third edition of Boulder Scotland has now been released! It's 320 pages of full colour adventure! If you want to get hold of a copy, it retails at £19.99 and can be ordered through the following suppliers:

Amazon >>>

Cordee >>>

The making of this guidebook took a lot longer than expected, rightly interrupted by dozens of new venues, plus the interim issue of the new edition to Essential Fontainebleau! For this edition, published a criminal nine years after the second edition, it was greatly aided by some local experts and I'd like to thank the advisory editors, your gratis copies will be on their way shortly.

This guidebook simply wouldn’t exist without the community spirit of all the boulderers who have added their contribution to this third edition of a Scottish bouldering gazetteer (the first was in 2005). This vastly expanded but still immature bouldering landscape is one of the world’s finest collection of geologies and will not run dry any day soon. We hope a strong ethic of exploration without impact continues with the new generations raised on indoor walls and training boards – the opportunities available to them are huge and open territory for their talents. Scotland is a land of freedom and adventurous access…

As general editor, the intention of this guide is to provide a balanced overview of Scottish bouldering, in terms of place, grade and general variety of experience, and especially to give the new visitor a gazetteer to get the best out of a visit to Scotland wherever they end up. We hope it is a tribute to this beautiful country and the practice (some say art) of bouldering in the wild.

There are many people to thank, not least the advisory editors who helped build and proof this guide, in particular: Colin Lambton, Nigel Holmes, Dan Varian, Pierre Fuentes, Kevin Howett, Gaz Marshall, Tom Kirkpatrick, Hamish Fraser, Richie Betts, Ian Taylor, Robbie Gardiner, Stewart Cable and Andrew Hunter. The publisher is grateful for their advice and tolerance to the general editor’s errors and in some cases excesses of enthusiasm.

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

Loch Lomond excursions

Climbing is deeply reassuring. Which seems odd to say, at first. There is so much anxiety around the climb, attached to anticipation, also to 'failure' and return, but when you are in the well, actually climbing, everything is as it should be – balanced. Climbing: it's not about imposing a sequence on the rock, more about accepting what choreography the rock will allow you, what it will release. It has to be studied in detail, with the body, not just the eye. Brushing and touching rock is the opening of the inner lens. The skin of the stone speaks with a deeper well of gravity and a resonance which can be felt only by touching the stone, gripping its friction, pulling into gravity's clasp and feeling that transmission of core and shaped mass. Shaped by pressure, wind, water, ice, the stone dictates its own movements from its own life. So when we boulder we are tracing something ancient rather than living any statement of the moment. Like following an invisible line or l

Stone Country

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