Stone Country – Landscapes and Lifescapes

The Plinth, Craigmaddie, Font 6c+ A perfect morning at Craigmaddie on Thursday 12th as the weather finally settles and the blue skies return. Warmed up on the lower roof lip traverse, trying not to slip off into the boggy gunk below. Then settled on the first 6c of the season, 'The Plinth' left hand version. It starts off the plinth, using the big block underneath for the feet, slap up the crimps on the shield, then a crux throw left for the sloper leads to a tricky one foot smear as you stare at the slopey ledge hold for the right hand. Not over yet, an easy-to-fail snatch for the top - a super problem and under-rated - feeling harder as the sandstone is still bleeding a little winter damp and my right hand kept flipping off. Millstone circle or gnomon? What does the 'H' mean? Reading up on Craigmaddie Muir, it has some interesting hidden history. Not only is there evidence of Neolithic and Bronze/Iron Age tombs and settlement, this is all confused by a...

This well-trodden nub of steepness in the Trossachs is anglicized into Gaelic, if you can think of it like that. That  tourist board poet Walter Scott, re-imagining the Trossachs as a heroic Celtic heartland, heard the original name 'Beannan' (small mountain) and came up with 'Ben-an heaved high his forehead bare'. Then, at some point, an apostrophe was added, I can find out no reason why other than to suggest a kind of imagined Gaelic by a confused OS surveyor or Victorian poets and guide-book writers trying to suffuse an element of throatiness into this tiny, confused and very simple peak. A bit like the 'h' in 'Rhum', it should just be sawn off at the stump.  After the storms on the Ben An path... 'Am Binnean' is the most accurate original guess ('small pointed peak') and the Gaels have always erred on the side of simple topographical description and human lives were generally too short, violent and irrelevant to christen...

A week in Ullapool over New Year saw us staring out of rain-lashed sash windows, or sqeezing blustery walks in between painful hail showers. Constant winds had brought up an impressive surf at the normally placid Achnahaird. I even tried to crank out the aptly named Clach Mheallain (Gaelic for 'hailstones') at Reiff in the Woods, racing to get myshoes on before the approaching storm, but fingers grew too numb and my boulder mat flipped over in my face - game over! a few boggy trots hunting down boulders led to one entertaining cleaning session in a full-on  rain storm, which was like scrubbing a filthy land-rover in a jet-wash. Rogie Falls in spate A week of storms throughout the country has led to the most saturated ground I've seen in Scotland, rock didn't stand a chance of drying in the bitter winds. We retired to the Ullapool Bouldering Wall, trying hard not to pull down Ian's carefully constructed training boards after too many pints and pies. ...

You know those people who push peanuts up a hill with their nose? Or Sisyphus rolling his rock? Such is the magnitude of the task and the strain on sanity which Niall Grimes was prepared to shoulder millenia ago, it seems, when the idea of a 'British Bouldering Guide' was a cute little puppy of a concept. Of course, it grew into a slavering beast of a project. And this colourful beast - the first and only bouldering guide to Britain (all 488 pages) - is now amongst us, like a bright new boulder that just materialised at your favourite venue. The book is, to quote a word Grimer likes, 'stunning'. Stunning rocks, stunning photos, landscapes to drool over, evening sunlight hitting rock... I could meander amongst its pages for hours, which is precisely what I did, throwing mental shapes and moves over all those lovely boulders. Scotland is given a page or two per major venue, and this whistle-stop approach is general throughout the book. It is a mammoth t...

I think the Angus Glens (Doll and Clova etc) have got some terrific potential beyond the Red Craigs if you get a good breezy summer day and fancy a walk with the mat... which is obviously what these adventurous lads at  Collective Productions have done. The teaser trailer has some terrific looking rock. I especially like 'Vanguard'. Bring on the full film!

I've been meaning to build a website of Scottish bouldering for ages, but it's a hell of a job and Scottish Climbs has a lot of stuff anyway and many people have their own blogs and sites which prove useful for the wandering boulderer in Scotland. Nevertheless, I've opened a Google Bouldering in Scotland site where I'm putting draft topos and updates for the forthcoming updated editions of the Bouldering in Scotland printed guides. As time goes by, I'll add more videos, topos, maps and photos to complement the print guides. We're looking for area authors for the three new guides: Central & South/Central Highlands/Northwest Highlands, so please get in touch if you want to feature your hard-earned expertise on the blocs - there are a lot of folk who have put so much time and effort into their bouldering and Stone Country is a community publishing press! Each area will be based on an accessible 'day-run' radius, including the islands closest to ...

In that Empire, the craft of cartography attained such perfection that the map of a single province covered the space of an entire city, and the map of the empire itself an entire province. In the course of time, these extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a map of the empire that was of the same scale as the empire and that coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the study of cartography, succeeding generations came to judge a map of such magnitude cumbersome, and, not without irreverence, they abandoned it to the rigours of sun and rain. In the western deserts, tattered fragments of the map are still to be found, sheltering an occasional beast or beggar; in the whole nation, no other relic is left of the discipline of Geography. Jorge Luis Borges, "Of Exactitude in Science" from A Universal History of Infamy (Penguin 1984 p.131) All maps are illusions, tricks of the mind, elaborate tapestrie...