Sunshine and Stone

Guess the glen...

The boulderer's idyll... seems like a while since we've had it...a sustained high pressure has dried out some of this extended autumn wetness (winter?) and I found myself on the flank of a glen, arm up against the sun ricocheting off a pylon, boulder mat throwing me a wobbler as I balanced over a barb-wire fence, following the sheep trails again... absorbed in that out-of-breathness as I toiled through steep heather to a spied shadow of steepness. Distant ribbons of vanishing snow on the Tarmachans like a sketched-out caricature of mountains, everything back in its place and the climbing simple and coming easily with renewed motivation, the body twisting eagerly and the hands hungry for the emery-rub of garneted rock. My eyes are always close to my hands when bouldering and I notice the little blood-nicks on my knuckles that the schist steals off me... you clock these little things and welcome them back...it's what makes bouldering special and personal, throwing shapes and finding the locks, chalking up holds and doing the dot-to-dot, like some over-cosseted and earnest kid pointing out all the capitals of the world on a map... we really do take it all too seriously sometimes, but bouldering is only properly done when it is child-like -no real thinking, just instinctive and impetuous movement and the delusion that the rock is taking you seriously... being spat off makes me laugh and I shake my head at my arrogance ... but what I pleasingly don't notice is the sun has passed over the hill and the shadows begin to swim up my legs like an ink-stain...

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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