Essential Fontainebleau - Pre Publication offer!

The new pocket guide to Fontainebleau is almost here!

The pocket book is full colour with maps, approach notes, photo-topos of over 350 problems and key secrets to solving the problems. It has been designed to give new visitors to the forest an introduction to the art of bouldering in Fontainebleau, or it can be used by the experienced as a lifetime ticklist of the most-wanted!

The chosen problems (it was a difficult editing process!) range from 2+ problems through to 8a, but most are in the 6a-7b range and accessible to the on-sighting boulderer (if you are lucky and talented, being plain strong doesn't always help!).

The guide will be available late October or early November and as a special offer to those who check into this blog, I'm selling two copies of the new guide with a free copy of Pete Murray's Elements DVD for only 20.00. As the guide retails for 9.99, that's a saving of 15 quid! Plus you get a spare copy of the new Font guide or a DVD to give as a Christmas gift to someone! Those of you who helped contribute photographs will receive a free copy in due course, but this offer is open to everyone.

All pre-orders can be done securely through Paypal - simple, quick, you don't need a Paypal account. Just a credit card or Switch! Click on the Buy Now button on the right.

I'll email you as soon as the guide arrives and is posted, ready for that winter trip!

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...

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...

Cobbled Together

The south peak ('Jean') on The Cobbler, 12th December 2015 Here's an interesting round-song of place-names for Arrochar, in cartullaries and statistical and printed records since 1395: Arrochar/Arochar/Arrochquhair/Arrochquhare/Arroquhar/Arachar/An Tairbeart Iar/An t-Àra ... I was walking uphill wondering what sticks, what's in a name, why do they change, does the landscape care, who are the caretakers of a place-name? We might just be flecks of mica flashing briefly on a sun-struck pebble in the streams, but names are important to us in our brief mappings of our landscapes. Our human territories are marked by names, sign-postings, marker boulders, paths and cairns, amongst other structures, both textual and physical. 'The Cobbler' mountain - Arrochar's finest and most distinctive peak - is a curious example of the fluidity of naming the landscape; of confusion, habit, fashion, politics, class, and misinformation. The confusion starts even w...

Stone Country – Landscapes and Lifescapes

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