Mountain Weather

Cir Mhor in May

Well, what happened to spring? It just seems to have jumped straight into high summer, but the ones we remember from long ago: mild winds, hazy sun, crisped grass and no rain... how long will it last, and without midges to boot? Maybe this will be the trad summer we have been waiting for!

I took a day off working on the new Font guide to head over to Arran, the large boilder plate slabs of granite gleaming like broken mirrors. The streams bubbled in full jacuzzi mode and confused buzzards circled high on the unseasonable thermals. Expecting a rash of parties on Cir Mhor, we were surprised to note only one other party on South Ridge. We meandered up West Flank Route, enjoying the sunny belays and cooling updrafts of air, listening to the endless cawing of ravens. Looking down over the vast U-bowl of Glen Rosa, the boulder fields caught my attention and it was tempting to go and look at a few unclimbed (but probably holdless) roofs after the route, but it's too warm for bouldering now and the body yearns for long sequences of dry rock in fine situations, which Arran provides.

Angus Murray on West Flank Route

After a lazy start on the second ferry over, the walk-in and climbing had eaten the hours and it was 5pm already, so we stomped back down, foodless, as the ravens had stolen all my baby-bels and a stack of four pancakes from my rucsac. The new path makes for a quick descent and we had time for the obligatory and welcome pint in Brodick.

Clouds over Glen Rosa

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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