Dumbarton Spring 2007

Sanction - Dave Macleod, BNI Boulder -Font 8b

It's been an early start at Dumbarton and folk are making progress, I'm very close to bagging my long term nemesis that is Pongo SS, but the weather has turned wet again and this problem is a weeper - figuratively and literally...

however, I heard that Malcolm Smith made the second ascent of Pressure while Dave MacLeod completed the roof section of his project on the BNI boulder - Sanction is the left side of the roof (Sabotage the right) which is a hard Font 8b, the link-up through the Perfect Crime start will make it Dumby's hardest...

Meanwhile, Alan Cassidy despatched King Kong - a frustrating Font 8a which is very easy to fail on at the last moves. 'Justice!' is Cassidy's comment on the whole affair! Michael Lee is also making progress on the Consolidated traverse, so we should watch for him eating through the grades...

Michael Lee working the end of Consolidated

On a weirder note, Dumbarton it seems is threatened by flood-tides, the driftwood each year (this includes girder-size planks, slabs of sheet iron and the usual flotilla of Tennent's cans...) is rising higher and higher, it is maybe pertinent to imagine that these boulders will one day be underwater? Would make Pongo a bit easier, with a snorkel...

Sinking! - Pic by Dave MacLeod

The Metadata of Being Human

Shamanistic zoomorphs, lithic graffiti, hallucinogenic tableaux, territory markings, knife-sharpeners … rock art – l'art rupestre – is so far beyond our traditional 'linguistic' history, it does not have an interpretative alphabet or a single line of confirmed meaning. There are many interpretations of the 'gravures' (carvings) and 'abris ornés' (decorated caves) in the hidden bivouacs throughout the forest of Fontainebleau. The sandstone marks easily under the nib of a hard flint from the deeper calcareous geology and this soft stone canvas has allowed our European ancestors to carve the stylised and modernistic strokes we might note as remarkable in a Picasso painting. Most of the carvings involve complex hash-marks and grids, overlaying each other, occasionally with mandala-like boxes. Sometimes there have been carved astonishingly beautiful anthropomorphs, (stylised human-like figures), or zoomorphs, (deities or humans manifesting in animal form) or argu...

Cobbled Together

The south peak ('Jean') on The Cobbler, 12th December 2015 Here's an interesting round-song of place-names for Arrochar, in cartullaries and statistical and printed records since 1395: Arrochar/Arochar/Arrochquhair/Arrochquhare/Arroquhar/Arachar/An Tairbeart Iar/An t-Àra ... I was walking uphill wondering what sticks, what's in a name, why do they change, does the landscape care, who are the caretakers of a place-name? We might just be flecks of mica flashing briefly on a sun-struck pebble in the streams, but names are important to us in our brief mappings of our landscapes. Our human territories are marked by names, sign-postings, marker boulders, paths and cairns, amongst other structures, both textual and physical. 'The Cobbler' mountain - Arrochar's finest and most distinctive peak - is a curious example of the fluidity of naming the landscape; of confusion, habit, fashion, politics, class, and misinformation. The confusion starts even w...

Ben Lomond - a Gaelic palette

Loch Lomond, Wednesday 28th December 2016 Mist, water and silvery light: a very Gaelic palette in midwinter between the storms, which these days all have names - we've been through Barbara's tantrums and Conor's backlash, but today was one of those steamed-up car sort of days. Warmish air from the southwest is rolling about Loch Lomond and gathering a chill as it picks up speed towards the snow-patched summit, so I take the clockwise 'wind with my back' option, steeply up the Ptarmigan ridge from Rowardennan, hearing a chuckle in the mist which is either a red grouse or the eponymous bird. Each landmark on the map is a clue to the Gaelic landscape - Tom Fhithich I think may be the raven's beak-nosed boulder or crag half up towards the knoll of Ptarmigan, which just breaks the mist, and assumes the role of target summit for the meantime as the main peak is in cloud. The small hidden tarns are full of slushy grey ice and the 'yellow bealach' is a...

Stone Country – Landscapes and Lifescapes

Search This Blog