Skip to main content

Wake Up and Have Your Corncrakes - Mull bouldering


I came to Mull to further scope out the fine bouldering around Fionnphort on the pink granite walls, one of which contributed the template to our own Scottish Climbs website. This is a place for summer bouldering, meandering between perfect walls and slabs, dancing along the beflowered crisp machair, climbing to the endless accompanimant of skylarks and corncrakes (by 5 in the morning these were 'bloody corncrakes').



Fionnphort is idyllic for long roaming sesssions of climbing in the easy movement and sudden puzzling positions into which granite slabs lure you... the climbing is either enjoyable or simply impossible due to the blank and rounded nature of the slabby domes. Here and there are some good cracklines and the occasional nodule pokes out to provide a resting foothold or a thankful hand feature. Most of the time the body is poised on fulcrums of balance, hoping the granite crystals won't crumble, or you piano-finger larger crystals to inch over that mantle.



There are hundreds of short solo walls and crags awaiting the bolder boulderer, around Kintra just to the north and at Erraid and Fidden to the south. Listen out for the famous corncrakes - you can't mistake them... they sound like some hopeless car-jacker touching two live wires together - krek krek! krek krek!


I've put a topo of a fun 'yellow' level circuit on my main website on the topo page.

Popular posts from this blog

The Metadata of Being Human

Shamanistic zoomorphs, lithic graffiti, hallucinogenic tableaux, territory markings, knife-sharpeners … rock art – l'art rupestre – is so far beyond our traditional 'linguistic' history, it does not have an interpretative alphabet or a single line of confirmed meaning. There are many interpretations of the 'gravures' (carvings) and 'abris ornés' (decorated caves) in the hidden bivouacs throughout the forest of Fontainebleau. The sandstone marks easily under the nib of a hard flint from the deeper calcareous geology and this soft stone canvas has allowed our European ancestors to carve the stylised and modernistic strokes we might note as remarkable in a Picasso painting. Most of the carvings involve complex hash-marks and grids, overlaying each other, occasionally with mandala-like boxes. Sometimes there have been carved astonishingly beautiful anthropomorphs, (stylised human-like figures), or zoomorphs, (deities or humans manifesting in animal form) or argu...
Read more

Beinn Dòrain

           Viaduct and Beinn Dorain Once you cross the bealach under Beinn Odhar north of Tyndrum, the shapely peak of Beinn Dòrain is a visual fanfare to the Highlands. The mountain and its environs are richly detailed in the poet Duncan Ban MacIntyre’s poem Moladh Beinn Dòbhrain (‘In Praise of Beinn Dòrain’). [i] Its symmetrical convexity, deeply gullied flanks like pencil sketch-marks, and stern domed summit, make this a moment to instinctively reach for the camera. It is a steep but invigorating mountain to walk, which is more leisurely explored from its eastern corries, though the traditional ascent from Bridge of Orchy, up to the toothed ‘Am Fiachlach’ ridge quickly brings fine views from the heart of the Central Highlands, encompassing Cruachan in the west to Lawers in the east and the Mamores to the north. If you were set the task to name the features and character of this mountain, before a Gaelic toponymy, you may have come up with a similar voc...
Read more

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...
Read more