Cave Crag Fun and Games

Nic Duboust on Marlena

During a pumped lull in working the sports routes at Marlena, Mike disappeared off with his shoes in hand seeking something amenable to solo in the rhododendron wilderness. He appeared back an hour later with a 'pretty good' boulder problem project instead. Hard, he said. Okay, I thought, Cave Crag and its environs are not renowned for the generosity of bouldering, but what a little gem! Having eventually refound the problem, his radar having gone astray, Mike pointed out a beautifully scooped groove with two obvious holds on the right and none on the left, sloping ledges and a rounded top-out - the perfect boulder problem: not quite enough but maybe just enough.

'The Project'

Numerous plays later he returned to the sports crag, still psyched but beaten for the day. Adrian Crofton, the bullshitting teuchtar, sent us off on a wild goose chase for a 'nice scooped boulder on a little meadow'. We found a chossy overhang on a bog.

Meanwhile, Nic was cruising up Silk and inexplicably tossing himself off Marlena, still, looking strong and fluid after just having repeated Sufferance the day before. Not to be outdone by the youth, Guy Robertson was cruising up Hamish Teds for warm-ups before despatching Silk Marlena, despite forgetting the sequence at the top and receiving bad beta from the dangling photographer.

Guy Robertson walking on Silk

Second session and the stamina is returning... off to bolt a new Loch Lomond crag today. By Monday we should have a new venue to add to the burgeoning list of sport climbing crags in Scotland, and more to add to the upcoming Stone Country Bloc Sport guides.

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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