Skip to main content

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

Popular posts from this blog

A Crow Dictionary

A Crow Dictionary Feannag –  black asterisk of the sky,   fitheach  – a quartz-glinting raven’s eye, starrag  – the hoodie prowling the shore, cathag  – the sea-eyed jackdaw,   cnàmhach  – blood-billed chough of the machair, pioghaid  – chuckling, piebald joker, ròcas  – the belfry’s raucous rook, garagg  – what the carrion bird took, sgreuchan-coille  – my own oak-guide jay, we look to each to show us the way.   In their very names the Scottish hills call out the dwelling place of birds. A toponymical survey of most Scottish mountain ranges or lochs reveals the legacy of Scotland’s familiar montane birds. Around Loch Lomond and its parent hill we have: Meall an t-Seabhaig (mound of the peregrine), Creag na h Iolaire (rock of the eagle), the high stony Ptarmigan Ridge on Ben Lomond, or Coire na Baintighearna (corrie of the mountain linnets). By far the most common toponym is for crags and hills named after the ubiquitous mo...
Read more

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...
Read more

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...
Read more