Glencoe Unclimbed and Unclaimed

Last of the Snows

Took a jaunt up to the Coe to do a little trad and check the mountain walls. Not surprisingly Slime Wall was still pretty slimy and catching weeps from snow melt, but all the south faces were drying nicely and the Rannoch Wall was reliable as ever, despite the high winds. Angus Murray tried 'Line Up' but went off route on a new variation 'Wind Up' which meanders right from the first belay, which was fun despite the perishing wind.

'Wind Up' HVS Rannoch Wall - Angus Murray climbing

Despite the fine weather there was only one other party on the wall - where have all the climbers gone? The Kingy is also a sad shadow of its former glory - the climbers' bar is just a museum of old grizzled heroes on black and white ice, or 80's rock stars in lycra. The 'golden era' is long gone I know but the Glen is surely worth a renaissance from gym-fit rock monsters who onsight 8a - there are plenty of wild new lines in the Coe for those young, fit and brave enough...

Awesome 60 m unclimbed overhanging wall in Glencoe

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...

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...

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...

Stone Country – Landscapes and Lifescapes

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