40 days and 40 nights...

...of rain... which has put paid to the Scottish bouldering scene for this year... everything is weeping and green, we need a benevolent high pressure to restore some normality to the bouldering scene, everyone's frustrated by the deluge, and it doesn't look like stopping. Grabbing windows of opportunity between the fronts is the only option and running the animated satellite forecasts is like watching the old broken back of Scotland being whipped by sadistic Atlantic fronts.

That said, I squeezed in a pleasant afternoon at St Bride's wall near Strathyre... a quartzy bulging wall with perfect landings and some good testpieces, just after the parking for the Ben Ledi walk-in. It is not extensive, but in bad weather it is only two minutes walk and facing south, so it's worth a visit when the higher boulders are not worth the risk. It catches the sun and a few hairy-knuckled gestures from passing white-vans, which you can feel free to return.

The main lines are fingery straight-up highballers, but traversing right and descending the quartz crack is more sensible after the rain has greened off the top-outs. Projects remaining include the low traverse (broken holds may have made this harder) and the Bulge direct ... (may be the line climbed by Kev Howett in the 80's 'Grey Matter') - this is a fingery looking nightmare into the 8th grade somewhere... with quartz nubbins and slopers from hell thrown in! I managed to tackle the bulge from the quartz seam side, cranking up a nice crossover sequence on the seam to a high and unhelpful sidepull, where body tension allows the feet to smear on and the sidepull becomes operable. Slapping out right to the said quartz sloper, a moment of insecurity follows before better holds come... an excellent Font 6c+/7a, let me know your thoughts!

Let's hope we are due some higher pressure...

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...

Scotland's Iconic Mountains #Broad Law

BROAD LAW The rolling hills east of the modern motorway of the M74 hold much more character and history than they appear from the west, where they are now flanked by forestries of spruce and wind-farms. In medieval times this was a Scottish royal hunting ground – the ‘Ettrick Forest’. Further east towards the Tweed valley, there are echoes of a deeper Scottish history in the border towns of Hawick, Selkirk, Galashiels, Peebles and Kelso, all on the banks of the historic River Tweed and famous for their medieval forts and abbeys. Looking west from Broad Law to the monoculture forestry and wind-farms of 21st C Scotland This range of hills, along with the northern flanks of the Cheviot hills, marks the geographical transition to the once-contested border with Northumberland, with its high pass over Carter Bar on the A68. The more useful sense of boundaries are suggested not by the roads but by the watersheds: to the north the waters drain into the River Cly...

Stone Country – Landscapes and Lifescapes

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