Tim Rankin has shown a fresh burst of energy and strength early in the season to claim the North East's first major boulder problem of the year - Optimus Prime - with an ascent of the dramatic and highball prow at Cammachmore south of Portlethen. This oft-spied line was thought to have an impassable blank section, but Tim managed to find a solving sequence on brushed edges, arete clamps and poor slopers... he says it goes at about V9 but Tim is unsure of the grade as the climbing is so unusual and specific, just expect it to be well hard! Tom Kirkpatrick filmed the first ascent. Named after his son's skills with the daddy Transformer, which leave most adult visitors gobsmacked, same as the problems!
‘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...