Malcolm Smith has done another incredible link up at Dumbarton called Firefight 8b. It climbs the Pressure cave then finishes up Firestarter. The hardest way through this cave had previously been Dave MacLoed's Pressure which finished up Smokescreen at 8b. Now that a slightly easier variation finish to Smokescreen (7c) was found by Alan Cassidy, Malc continued his journey to find the hardest link-up lines at Dumbarton and logically added Firestarter (8a) as the natural 'hardest' finish to the cave! Thanks to Will Atkinson for recording this on the video...
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...