Craigmaddie, the 'Northumberland in Glasgow' venue, really comes into its own in summer. Its rough sandstone is grippy and dries out nicely, leaving some of the damper winter roofs open for new lip traverses and deep cave starts. Colin Lambton, 'king of the lip traverse' and John Watson, unlocked the 'Stellar Adventure' lip traverse of the Sheep Pen left roof, which has brushed up well to give a classic outing...
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...