Stone Country – Landscapes and Lifescapes

Living Stones ‘ For although we are accustomed to separate nature and human perception into two different realms, that are in fact indivisible. Before it can ever be a repose for the senses, landscape is a work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock .’ Simon Schama, Landscape & Memory The American anthropologist A. Irving Hallowell spent most of his research time amongst the Ojibwe culture of Canada. This culture he discovered did not distinguish between the animate and the inanimate. In fact, any object or being could find itself attributed to a living being with answerable qualities. He found the Ojibwe exhibited a seamless ability to 'see' a stone or tree as alive or animated with some spirit of being in much the same way a person is, and the waking world to be as mutable as the dreaming world. Any phenomenon, whether it be a bird, a stone, a tree, or even the sound of thunder, could all act as tempo...

Many volumes have been written on risk from the point of view of Economics, Evolutionary Theory, Society, etc.but risk on the hills is becoming a lot more topical with the sheer volume of people approaching mountains as something akin to 'instant freedom' from the urban world or as a monetised escape. The recent criticism of mountaineering as rich people building their CV and measures to limit ascents of Everest, for example, have brought this issue to the fore. What are our mountaineering responsibilities and rights in a 'post-exploration' world? Our author Francis Sanzaro (author of 'The Boulder'), now editor of Rock & Ice, has written an intriguing piece for the New York Times on our right to take risks in the mountains.

In his famous 'allegory of the cave', the Greek philosopher Plato pondered the artificiality of reality in imagining how we could be fooled into thinking shadows on the wall (i.e. virtual reality) could be seen as 'real' life. I'm paraphrasing, of course. What has this got to do with climbing? Well, I was pondering this myself recently while sitting on an artificial concrete boulder at the new Cuningar Loop bouldering park in Glasgow. Does it really matter that a boulder is made of concrete, surrounded by plantation and skirted with kind gravel traps rather than tree roots and spikey boulders? Isn't the 'real' thing so much better: the isolated erratic bloc deposited by geology's long-term aesthetic artwork? Well, yes, that's entirely up to you, but sometimes the artificial saves the day ... I was scuppered by Glasgow's cross-town traffic and turned back to my local artifice that is Cuningar to climb the blue circuit I had imagined as...

Sound mirrors at Denge, Dungeness I have perched on icy ledges in a winter storm, listening to the main-sail buffeting of a wind against a large rock buttress. It creates deep booming sounds on impact and surreal whistles and songs as it howls through fingered gaps in the shattered rock rims of corries. There is a high lonely corrie to the east of the summit of Ben Dorainn called Coire Chrutein ('Hollow of the Harps') with a rocky wall called Feadan Garbh ('rough chanter') which perfectly captures the suggested soundscape of a mountain in a storm, and this aural presence to a place often needs extreme weather for us to be conscious of it, yet it is always a present and often subtle informant of place and feeling. Of course, we are all familiar with more gentle sounds of summer such as rills and burns tinkling over rock-steps, or larks improvising their jazzy song in deep blue skies, but it belies the rules that when 'looking' at landscape we take for grant...

...move lightly, trace the rock like shadow, let it return  I was struck by one sentence in Robert MacFarlane's darkly sparkling article on Generation Anthropocene in the Guardian recently, when he is pointing us to the artistic response to living in a new geological era created by our own presence and detritus: '...salvation and self-knowledge can no longer be found in a mountain peak or stooping falcon, and categories such as the picturesque or even the beautiful congeal into kitsch.' Romantic notions of the sublime are dead and even our so-called wildernesses, such as the Highland bleakness, are manufactured landscapes appealing to our sense of self-reflective emptiness and vistas of consciousness. They are accidents of land management, political histories of resource and exhaustion, 'wilded' by deforestatation and adjusted to our current sensitivites. Where now can the picturesque be found, in a world of plastic seas and turtles drowned in fishing n...

When I first arrived at Dumbarton Rock, I never thought the dramatic geology I saw  –  the square-cut overhanging main faces, the giant beaked boulders, the moody facets of black and orange rock  –   were anything but solid and unchanging. I never thought there would be a character to the rock other than its intimidating immediacy and its industrial ‘clash and bang’ of sheer physicality and  its contextual setting in the post-industrial decline of  Dumbarton and the Vale of Leven .    Maybe that’s what happens on all first visits to a climbing venue  –  a kind of heightened sense of the place’s physical presence  –  but if you spend years repeating visits to a place, it becomes a more temporal or invisible thing, in fact it almost vanishes before your eyes, first impressions rubbed out, to be replaced by folded-in memories of faced-down failures and subtle successes, and countless other small details. In fact f...