I'd always known there were big stones on Ben Donich - it's typical of Arrochar rock architecture with split schist crags and chasms and jumbles of scree giants in corries - but I'd never gone up for a proper scout. So, with the forecast promising sun in between hail and snow, I squelched up the speedy north east ridge to the summit in under an hour, then backed down the craggy east flank towards the Brack, stalking the boulder clusters, giving sheep the odd adrenaline-shock. Arrochar schist is not impressive in the wet of midwinter, its lichen coat soaking up slime and soaked heather-bunnets dripping down cracklines. Nevertheless, finding such a bloc as this bodes well for summer projects and those who like solitude and king lines topping out at 8m over, for a change, reasonable landings...
‘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...