Dumby Clean-Up Weekend

Saturday 20th April and Sunday 21st April. 10am - 4pm.

Please come and show your support for Dumby by lending a hand getting the place cleaned up along with the local people of Dumbarton. The idea is to pick up litter and get the place looking a little tidier and maybe do some anti-erosion work below the problems, as well as some other work in tandem with West Dunbartonshire Council. There will be a BBQ set up to make a focal point which will be selling food and drink for after and some climbing may even happen! It shouldn't interrupt your climbing plans other than making you feel guilty for not cleaning and going climbing instead, but that's fine, you can join in for a bit if you're there.

Things will kick off from 10am on Saturday 20th April and Sunday 22nd at the waterfront area beneath the Eagle Boulder where the BBQ will be set up. Some bin bags, gloves etc will be provided but if you could bring your own that would be great. Exact details of what will happen each day will be announced here: TCA Facebook Event and you can sign up to attend there as well.

Let's get Dumby looking how it should!

A previous clean-up at Dumby...

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...

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Stone Country – Landscapes and Lifescapes

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