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Stone Country Reviews

We are gearing up a little for Christmas and providing a few offers if anyone is looking for gifts for that keen boulderer!

All items can be bought securely through the STONE COUNTRY SHOP :

Stone Play - The Art of Bouldering £19.95

'The prints excellently portray the many aspects of bouldering, from aggression, technicality and confusion, to calm, subtlety and mastery. The essays complement the prints, taking the reader into the minds of some of bouldering's main protagonists – old and new. Overall this is a thought-provoking book for any climber, prompting personal reflection on one's own style, attitude and habits.'

Dave Redpath

Free additional T-Shirt with each T-Shirt order (£9.99) ie. two for a tenner!!


Stone Country Edition 1 - NOW ONLY £9.99 !!




Free draw - win the new Bouldering Guide!!



The new full colour edition of Stone Country will be available by February 2008, and I'll be entering everyone who gets in touch in a draw to win a free copy, deadline is Dec 31st 2007.

Just send an email with your name and address to boulderscotland@gmail.com

Also in the shop, I'll be selling more guidebooks and DVD's. To start with, there's Pete Murray's Chains at £16.99... Pete is currently working on a new film which will beavailable through Stone Country in 2008. Pete always provides an intelligent angle on our climbing world, showing us that there is deeper meaning and personal politics to our obsessions in climbing...



I was also sent a copy of the new Hotaches film Committed Vol.1 and enjoyed it thoroughly... it was another palm-wringing adventure through extreme British trad climbing and I hope it is the start of a fine documentray tradition of DVD's from the Hotaches crew. The production was excellent, the routes jaw-dropping and some of the fall footage is becoming legendary... these should come with an X-rated warning that you will spoil yourself, especially the footage of Meshuga in the new film! Congratualtions to Dave and Paul and the crew for continuing a high-quality independent film company... it's a hard shift traveling and producing and editing those thousands of minutes of footage - they deserve our attention and a little of our Christmas money! The film (and the excellent E11 movie are both available through their website).





Next year will see a busy production schedule for Stone Country guides. We'll have local bouldering guides, individual area topos available laminated and online, as well as Pete Murray's new bouldering movie. There will also be a guide to a European venue and quite possibly a collection of essays on Scottish Traditional climbing... so keep checking back on the blog.

Let's hope for a cold, crisp, sloper-sticky Christmas and New Year.

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Filming in Morar

Pete Murray and myself travelled up to meet Dave MacLeod at his '8c' cave in Morar. This secretive and impressive venue took us a while to find, but was obvious once we did - a 50 degree walled quartzite cave with no moss or drips or lichen and a singular line of chalked holds disappearing into the triangular darkness - Dave's 8c project. I pulled on a few holds the first day and tried one or two moves, but the sheer brutality and power required was too much and we let Dave show us his rubric of moves and contortions that allow the cave to be climbed. The 'easiest' lines appear to be butch 7a's and the top level is close to Dave's idea of Nirvana - long power-plays and complex link-up sequences. We bagged some good film and a short interview about the place which will be forthcoming in a new short film from Pete Murray, to go along with a new collection of writing on bouldering from Stone Country.

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...

Echo Wall Review

This is an exceptional film about the bizarre relationship between mountains, humans and risk. No matter that it features probably the most serious high-end route on the planet, Dave and Claire MacLeod have created a unique vision of obsession, determination and stress. 'Echo Wall' captures all the emotional trauma of climbing at the limit in a situation where failure is unacceptable. As an independent team, Claire and Dave have obviously worked really hard to bring this film together and they succeed in showing some of the sacrifice and pain of climbing what is effectively E12 on the most inhospitable mountain in Britain. 'The Ben' is not always inhospitable and the film opens with some fine time-lapse images of clouds clearing and alpen-glow washing down the peppered eminence of The Comb high in Coire na Ciste. Some helicopter shots give us the right impression that the north face of this mountain is something truly alpine and alien to the lush land 4000 feet below....