Stone Country – Landscapes and Lifescapes

larrybane Originally uploaded by jsw2004 .

I have touched a lot of rock in the last couple of decades and wanted to try and retrieve the emotions of it a little bit better, rather than just saying, oh yes, I've done that... and that...that too. If you took this attitude to climbing, there'd be no point moving at all, you'd have just gone through physical motions like going to work and it would all have no context at all. A climbing friend once said he felt strange that he might just be remembered for 'being able to hang on small bits of rock for ages" and this is the fear we have, that it is all meaningless. I don't believe it is - most of us understand our climbing intuitively and it is a spiritual thing that just happens as you climb and is contiguous... no need to talk about it. I would feel the same, but also think it is worthwhile bringing something to the mountain or the stone other than just more desire... an echoing ear at least, or an engram eye. It is good when moving on new rock and old memor...

Deep in the cave something... like a light when you crack your head on an overhang, but in a green tinge, the stuff you can't focus on... The problem above me lay still, the magnetised relationship of holds divorcing into just being rock, and I remembered where I'd seen this before... on Arran, twenty years ago as a youth, during a midnight swim opposite the Holy Island. The water bloomed around me in billions of phosphorescent living things. Either the sea was hallucinating, or I'd got over-excited and pee'd in the great swimming pool of life... it races through twenty years to paste in the celluloid...amazing how memory covers ground so fast. Boulderers find themselves in odd places, like an Indiana Jones extra lost in the wrong canyon, eyed by the beasts, suddenly nowhere near the cameras and action. I sit on the mat for a while and absorb the green gold glowing away happily beside me. Perfect time to be swallowed whole by the only sabre-toothed tiger in Scotland. T...

Mohammed-Ali-Boulder-1-web Originally uploaded by jsw2004 . Rope-A-Dope V4

A weekend of untouched boulders and hero stones, fine rewards in lost places, I pay thanks to the golden ratio: for every good day we must suffer so many bad... the necessary trade-off of awry days, bad weather, midgies and plain stupidity... ‘I could see them from Glen Etive, one eye on the road, the other chameleon eye scouring the hillside above. The car kept lurching into roadside ruts on the single track so I stopped and pulled out a pair of binoculars. Shakily, I held them against my spectacles and briefly granite came into gleaming focus - sun beamed off clean white prows and my heart leapt with bouldery anticipation. But I could be wrong: I had been fooled before – stone giants had become lichenous dwarfs when I arrived. I tried to judge their size by the shrubs and trees around – they seemed to belittle the shrubs and respectably diminish the proportions of a stand of Scots Pine high on the hill. I resolved to climb them. The only problem was a Great Barrier Reef of Rhod...

Stronachlachlar dynamics

'The Menin Road' www.stonecountry.co.uk