Stone Country – Landscapes and Lifescapes

Spring in Glen Lednock... red kites, buzzards, curlews, lapwings, munro-baggers and boulderers. Everything out at it, we attacked the blocs and shredded tips on this particularly vicious geology - a compact quartz schist, every pocket like a Piranha's kiss. Just grazing the rock takes the skin off your knuckles, so working a sequence out mentally, and visualizing your moves, is good advice for this venue. Or just watch someone else and absorb the beta... anything to save skin and allow more than the obligatory two hours before the tips start throbbing. Whilst there are some good 7th grade testpieces such as Tsunami, Manic Stupor, Monochrome and Reiver's Logic, the most fun is to be had circuiting the best problems around Font 5 to 6b (a Font red circuit, or Lednock 'blood' circuit). The outlook over the Sput Rolla waterfall and down Glen Lednock is idyllic. Updated list of problems at: https://sites.google.com/site/boulderscotland/glen-lednock

One of the unfortunate consequences of doing a full-colour photo-book with essays is neglecting to give enough space for the written word. We published Stone Play - the Art of Bouldering in 2007 and it was  well received as a book which gave bouldering a voice outside of the traditional climbing sphere, allowing it a little philosophy of its own. However, many articles had to be cut to allow a fuller complement of photography, one of the most expensive and unnecessary mistakes I've made in publishing! Since then, much more has been written on the aesthetics of bouldering and there is a vibrant and growing literature to match its online presence in video and image. So, we've decided to revisit the book, but this time reducing the fascination with the image (heavily saturated in our online age) and allowing the written word to coax out the subtle and elusive experience of bouldering. On re-reading, the words are generally so much more adept at capturing the fluid inner-...

On a round of the rigs of Galloway Forest Park, via The Merrick and the glacial lochs of Enoch and Neldricken, we were intrigued by an OS reference to 'The Murder Hole', marked as a water feature in blue by Loch Neldricken. This is possibly an anglicized term for a feature once known in Gaelic, for the area was originally colonised by the Irish Gaels, as suggested by the toponym of Galloway itself, named after the medieval Gaelic 'Gallgaidelib'  and referring to a 'land of the foreigners/Gaels' - 'Gall Ghaidhealaibh' in modern Gaelic. Gaelic for murderer is 'murtair', so an anglicization is easy if this was a pool renowned for murderous drowning, though it seems a long way to go to drown someone - the Buchan burn gorge is a lot more accessible! It was, however, picked up by the writer Samuel Rutherford Crockett as a setting for his novel 'The Raiders', in which The Murder Hole eponymises a chapter. 'I was carried among them...

Took advantage of the high pressure drying out the gritty sandstone at Craigmaddie for a few hours bouldering before the skin could take no more. If anyone knows about Mason marks, have a look at the photo below and let me know what they mean. These marks are under the left sheep pen, next to (presumably) old quarriers' names 'A. Cairns' and 'J. Neilson'. I assume these guys, or colleagues, carved the mason marks onto the sheltered back walls of the caves, no doubt during long lunch breaks or wet days when they couldn't be bothered digging out the mill-stones.

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. ...