Stone Country – Landscapes and Lifescapes

I have been going on for years about Dumbarton Rock being one of our finest examples of modern 'sporting heritage', a kind of living history and an example of community 'ownership' (I use this in the least possessive sense) through simple occupation and use, under the shadow of more static heritage that is purely conservatory (I mean no disrespect to Historic Scotland and the castle!). It's how we create identity after all and is part of the greater weave of history, but seen from the ground-up and the everyday, which is an approach that is gradually displacing the top-down perspective of traditional historiography. One of the most exciting projects around is a community-history project with the acronym ACCORD, which stands for Archaeology Community Co-Production of Research Data. What does this mean? Well, for climbers, it means we are gathering a group in early July to photograph the boulders and maybe the crag, with loaned equipment and cameras, to create...

This quartz-veined schist wave of rock is a south-facing glacial crag easily spotted in a field on the A84, opposite St Bride’s Chapel and graveyard, a few kilometres north of Callander as it passes along the Garbh Uisge’s ‘Falls of Leny’ and the south end of Loch Lubnaig. It is easily accessible from a straight-road layby south of the chapel, cross the road (carefully, as traffic is fast), walk north and enter a field to walk over to the crag - two minutes. The bulging crag has a number of short traditional routes surmounting the ramp onto slabs, such as the flake crack Bride’s Crack (HVS) on the right, but below the distinctive rising ramp feature is a steep wall with increasingly hard and higher problems from left to right. The wall has been bouldered on only sporadically since the 70s, so names and grades are speculative and first ascents are murky. Angus Clark and John Watson repeated the obvious problems in 2007 and 2008 respectively, possibly documenting and naming alrea...

A long winter and finally my favourite local venue is dry...

The maritime sliver of schist and quartzite that is the Isle of Gigha is an island of two coasts: a sheltered riviera of sandy bays on the east and a weathered and hardened west coast facing the Atlantic between Kintyre and the Oa of Islay. The central ridge of the island is wooded on the lee side and shelters most of the community around the hub of Ardminish and the old wooded Achamore. For climbers, the best trail is the west coast from the south pier to the summit of Creag Bhan, which is a day-long walk between ferries with some good climbing and bouldering, largely underdeveloped. The northern island of Eilean Garbh has some steep crags for sport-heads and a remarkable tombolo beach, polluted to hell with plastic on the drift side but postcard-perfect on the lee side. Walk up from the pier to the village shop at Ardminish, turn left and south past the hotel to the south of the island, past Achamore gardens and Gigha windfarm - the ‘dancing ladies’, four windmills as of 2...

‘The Stony Place’ as it translates, the archaeological notes on the RCAHMS database for Eigg, state baldly the lost humanity of Grulin as early as an 1880 OS survey map: ‘…eighteen unroofed buildings, six enclosures and a field-system’. Now a scheduled monument and memorialised as a ‘depopulated settlement’, though it is not obvious if the verb is passive or aggressive, Grulin Uachdrach (Grulin Upper) is, like Hallaig on Raasay, a place of violent silence and resonance. Who lived here and why was the site abandoned? If it were not in Scotland, suspicions might fall to the climate, remoteness and apparent unsustainability of the stony place, a rabble of large rocks under the steep slopes of An Sgurr, but the carefully constructed walls tell us it was once a thriving township – the kilns, folds and blackhouse walls integrated with the giant boulders such as Clach Hosdail. In 1853 the whole of the village of Grulin, both upper and lower, housed fourteen families who were forced to l...

Glasgow's quarried hinterlands, such as the braes above Paisley, Johnstone and Elderslie, well what can we say of them, what is there for the climber: dank landfill quarries, briars flagged with poly bags, Tennents cans and Cider bottles, dog-shite, plastic detritus, road-dumps, graffiti splatters, neds, broken bikes and unmbrellas, abandoned tyres, fire-pits ... or, if you're in a brighter mood: sunbitten orange basalt, birds singing, blue skies and daffodils, technical moves & rough textures, silver birch, silence, a warmed back as you climb... Windyhill is an odd little bouldering backwater, but a little attention, litter-picking, briar-bashing, in short a simple bit of bouldery love, and the place is fine for an evening's sunny bouldering in the lower grades. There's even a car-park 10 yards across the road now. No excuses then, but bring your secateurs, those briars are vicious!

Before the milder weather arrived, we ran the Friday night bothy run from Glasgow to Newtonmore, then up early amongst the pines of the Sugarbowl into the Chalamain Gap and the Lairig Ghru. Lurcher's Crag provided an icy gully, sunny belays and views across to Braeriach's plateau S-carved with skiers. We meandered down snow-wisped slopes of Creag an Leth-choin, back to Aviemore for the night. Strathnairn was next day's choice for some sunny bouldering, of course the Ruthven Boulder was the target after a visit to see the Farr boulder. A walker on his way up Stac Gorm called the uniquely rough gneiss 'Strathnairn granite' and noted to us that it necessitated wearing gloves if you were building a wall, as it tore the skin from your tips. We noted that too after an hour or so, as well as a general wilting of power on the butch bouldering on this world-class stone. Here's a short guide to the stone: The Ruthven Boulder Ambience: steroid bloc...