Lendalfoot Bouldering

Revisited this neglected wee coastal venue on a fine hot day with a cool sea breeze to dry the tidal boulders. Reclimbed a few old problems and have described the best here, named in absentia of any actual history - they have been done before. Paul Savage visited here years ago and I suspect his '8a' project was the black wall - a leaning tidal highball roof and wall.

Lendalfoot Boulders NX 134 906

Lenndalfoot is a summer shingle beach venue with a terrific view out to Ailsa Craig. The boulders along the beach provide limited bouldering with a few choice problems and some hard projects on the central black wall boulder. It is immediately accessible from laybys on the beach at Lendalfoot, a few miles south of Girvan on the A77. There are three sectors: the northern being the best with the Orange Walls and northern leaning ‘pinnacle face’, the central black wall boulder (tidal) and the village boulders and walls to the south. Summer is best when a drying breeze dries out the weepy shale.

 1. Toffee Nosed Bastard Font 6c

Northern sector. Orange Walls northern ‘pinnacle face’. SS and climb the steep tapering toffee bulge via a long reach off an undercut to a diagonal crack, use holds in this to slap up to the left arête to gain reluctant jugs over the top left.

Pinnacle Face of the Orange Walls (Toffee Nose)

 2. Toffee Nosed Traverse Font 6b

SS on the far right of the pinnacle face of the Orange Walls and traverse hard left to gain the left arête and rock round this. Excellent technical lock offs and presses, the footholds are poor if the sand is high!

Project:

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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