Dave MacLeod has climbed the project roof of the Aonach Eagach boulder above the Stob Coire car park. This lone boulder has an excellent steep roof, the right side of which gives 'Bittersweet' Font 7b+. To access the lone boulder, walk 5 mins above the car park for Stob Coire, diagonally uphill on the Aonach Eagach, but heading down the glen. Take a rising traverse arcoss a big scree fan until you come across this single hidden boulder. Dave has a video from his blog site www.davemacleodblogspot.com
‘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...