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STONE COUNTRY (Read 144183 times)

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#50 Chilling Out and Freaking Out
July 14, 2011, 01:00:07 pm
Chilling Out and Freaking Out
14 July 2011, 9:03 am



Taking photos in Glencoe for Jules' forthcoming book'Vanishing Point'. Managed to catch Daniel Laing and Murdoch Jamieson on the Freak Out wall ticking the classics, then some pleasant bouldering down at the boulders beside Loch Achtriochtan. Jules' book is nearly complete, will let everyone know the due date soon.





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#51 Craig Minnan
July 25, 2011, 01:00:06 pm
Craig Minnan
25 July 2011, 6:42 am

A forgotten, windswept moor with broken old crags overlooking Inverclyde, it's a good spot to escape in the high summer. I'd be keen to know if anyone has bouldered here - Little Craig Minnan, in particular, was a terrific  buttress with exciting problems over good grassy landings. There appears to be more rock in Muirshiel than I remember, as though I'd missed some vulcanism in the last decade or so. Buttresses everywhere... but sometimes the high contrast summer light makes them seem more substantial than they are!





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#52 Glencoe
July 27, 2011, 07:00:07 pm
Glencoe
27 July 2011, 4:07 pm





Glencoe, a set on Flickr.

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#53 Reiff & Cnoc Breac
August 08, 2011, 01:00:33 am
Reiff & Cnoc Breac
7 August 2011, 6:06 pm



Reiff & Cnoc Breac, a set on Flickr.The last of the summer? What a scorcher at Reiff. Cnoc Breac was pretty good as well as a bouldering venue.

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#54 Powmill Blocs
August 24, 2011, 07:00:12 pm
Powmill Blocs
24 August 2011, 12:06 pm





Powmill Blocs, a set on Flickr.I'd appreciate any topos, grades, problems, names etc of the bouldering at Powmill that hasn't appeared on UKC for the A-Z of Scottish bouldering. Fine little venue for a dry sunny day in Autumn. I almost felt I was in a small corner of Font...

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The Climbing Academy -new bouldering centre for Glasgow
7 September 2011, 11:05 am

 It was kind of Rob Sutton and other directors to show me round the nearly complete 'Climbing Academy' bouldering centre at the old News International warehouses in , Glasgow (just below the M8 flyovers on the south exit of the Kingston bridge, off Paisley Road West). These premises are huge - thousands upon thousands of square feet of wood-panelled walls, at all angles, stretching down long corridors, circling into hidden spaces and tunnels. It is destined to become Scotland's largest and most ambitious bouldering centre and will bring bouldering to the masses as much as to the dedicated, jaded Scottish boulderer!

 



Based on the popular 'TCA' ('The Climbing Academy') in Bristol, I was impressed as much with the holistic and rounded philosophy for development of bouldering as a mainstream health and fitness activity (both mental and physical!), as with the plans for a dedicated, world-class training centre and international competition space. The space itself is cavernous and tall, labyrinthine, with a cave-like insulation guaranteed to keep things at a steady cool temperature in both winter and summer.

 

The facilities will be impressive and ergonomic: childrens' play areas; chill-out spaces; a good-food cafe; matted yoga and stretching spaces; rooms for professional treatments and therapists; showers; and a dedicated bouldering shop! The idea, I was told, was to create an uncrowded, explorative space, replicating the circuit feel of a compact outdoor venue. Walls of all angles link into each other, showcasing colour-coded 'natural' lines in graded circuits like Fontainebleau. Downloadable topos and circuit maps will be available for visitors to challenge themselves and benchmark their progress in the art of bouldering.



This philosophy of inclusivity cannot be underestimated and it seems the directors have got the 'vision' spot-on: bouldering should be accessible to all  and athletic climbing 'play' is the name of the game, no matter what circuit or grade you are chasing. Wandering under the painted, bolt-holed boards, I was in full visualisation mode,  imagining 'classic' problems up prows, over lips, through roofs, round aretes . . .  it truly will be a blessing to have such a venue for those long winter nights and those rainy summer days in Scotland.

The centre is planning to open in late autumn, with a super-flexible pricing policy. Keep up to date with their blog and join up as soon as they open - as a climbing art in itself, this is what bouldering has deserved all along.







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#56 Craigmore Crag
September 25, 2011, 07:00:07 pm
Craigmore Crag
25 September 2011, 4:51 pm

  A few dedicated Craigmore 'believers' have been busy tidying up the bouldering for this crag (as well as the litter and the last of the chanterelles!). Stone Country is working on the new guide for Southern Scotland (Stone Country Bouldering in Scotland Volume 1), which will mean a lot of problem checking, grade arguments and very sore skin if my tendons and back hold out long enough - otherwise I'll need an army of guinea pigs.

Craigmore comes into magical conditions only occasionally, autumn dry spells being my favourite. Before the rain swept in today, I had a fresh, leaf-whispering morning on Jamie's Overhang repeating all the variations (apart from 'Surprise Attack', which I've done once and doubt I'll get done again for a while!). Look at the disdain here as I kick away my own boulder mat on the excellent wee Font 6c dyno 'The Art of War':



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#57 Chasing the right weather . . .
October 11, 2011, 01:00:09 pm
Chasing the right weather . . .
11 October 2011, 8:08 am

 Not as odd a concept as you may think . . . with the amount of forecasting sites available on the web, 'chasing the weather' has become a black art.

All of us who love the outdoors have different priorities when it comes to weather: rock climbers, winter mountaineers, canoeists, surfers, walkers, paragliders. However, we all have one thing in common: the perfect forecast! For a surfer, this may be a settled period after a storm, with huge swells and little wind. For walkers and climbers, it is the eternal hunt for the 'blue day', usually a high pressure forecast with light winds and dry conditions underfoot. For canoeists, rain-swollen, low pressure systems whet the appetite, as the rivers boil into bursting arteries of peaty water. For paragliders, only the stillest, 'thermal' days will do.



Many old-timers will smell it in the wind, or have developed an instinct for it, such as 'mixed' winter mountaineers. This rare breed of snow-scrapers seek out hoared up rock in the Highlands, with each hill-range cursed with particular micro-climates and eccentric thermal behaviours influenced by a largely maritime situation - only perfect combinations of temperature, moisture and wind direction will see the cliff face come into 'perfect nick'. Nothing is more disappointing after a 2am alpine start, a 4 hour drive, a powder-snowed 3 hour walk-in, than to find the cliff  'black' and dripping, rather than frozen into a turfy, dandruffed playground.



For boulderers, only a dry, cold spell in autumn or winter, when the leaves wither into Barbecue crisps and the rock squeaks with chalk, will do. For trad climbers, long summer high pressures are the stuff of dreams, it seems more so these days.



 And so we all have our favourite forecasting sites, trawling through our list of Favourites to find the forecast that's 'just right', knowing fine well the weather will do just what it's going to do. It doesn't stop us picking our forecasts, though. Here are a few of my most visited sites for chasing weather in Scotland - my favourite is the Norway site. The Scandinavians are obviously used to Atlantic weather fronts and YR.NO is a great weather channel providing a time-slide animation which features wind direction, temperature and precipitation at once. It also offers pretty accurate long-term forecasts for those of us stuck at the coalface of dirty, jet-streamed low pressure queues...

 

The BBC also offers a reasonable time-slide satellite animation and good break-downs of  daily local conditions:  

 

The best mountain sites for Scotland are the MWIS page, a PDF-based system, and the Met Office Mountain Forecasts  



 



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#58 Italian Lakes interlude
October 23, 2011, 07:00:09 pm
Italian Lakes interlude
23 October 2011, 3:24 pm

 

A week of late autumn sunshine and soft alpine breezes made for a perfect walking trip, plus some stunning rock architecture curtain-walling the many well-marked paths of the Italian trail network. Lierna is a superb base for exploring Lake Como and the foothills of the Sondrio alps, underneath the high ridges of the Grigna and the Legnone. The high treeline allows shaded walks to about 1500m, I tripped over myself several times as 300m faces of rock reared through the gaps in the oak and beech.

 It was also a trip to unwind, watch sunsets with a beer or two and swan about the jigsaw harbour villages of Varenna, Bellagio, Menaggio. I even thought I might catch a glimpse of George Clooney on his Vespa - 'Ciao, George!' - but his name was banned on the holiday, just referred to as Voldemort...  

 Lake Como is a leggy lake with two branches reaching down to old Etruscan/Roman towns of Lecco and Como, the hidden bays more accessible by boat than land, usually punctuated with peninsular castles and echoing the longue duree of history and struggle for the control of the high alpine passes. Etruscans, Celts, Gauls, Romans and then Longobardi fed the distinctive mixed-blood of these mountain lakes before the Italians just seemed to give in to a flashier culture of style, cars and football. You'd certainly be hard pushed to discover a sense of  cultural and financial nervousness currrent in other European countries, there's a lot of brash money on display here. Some of the cars aren't quite so flashy, though...





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#59 Mapping the forest, or mapping the mind?
October 29, 2011, 07:00:38 pm
Mapping the forest, or mapping the mind?
29 October 2011, 2:53 pm

 

       
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 vwhole 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 tapestries of scale. And they only exist in our head, despite their intricate keys and contours. Look at old political maps of the world, or Ptolemy's map of Scotland, or Timothy Pont's 'reformed' maps of the Scottish Highlands - they hint more at our imagination and preoccupations, rather than any 'physical' reality. Google maps are still just a satellite's myopic squintings, whatever their resolution. Anyway, being exact is impossible, fractals lead us into chaos, and by nature a 1:1 scale would be a ragged reality, as Borges suggests.



 Ptolemy's Map of Scotland, which way is up, what is north?

Mapping for a book, providing a topographical 'bird's eye' overview, is already an imagining and a very personal interpretation. How do you reduce the world to a page? What is the optimum reduction you need? To map Fontainebleau for a guidebook on bouldering, I had to take my mental canary, intrepid little visionary high above my head, directing the wandering biped far below amongst the trees, clutching his sketchbook.

 


  Mapping the chaos of boulders meant long wanderings with the mental canary controlling my scratching pencil from on high . . .  I was a human puppet in thrall to shapes of rock, stacked cubes - Jenga-towers of plinths and boulders. I marked on my little numbers, drew my squares and circles, interlocked my rhomboids, laid down my contours and began to grow the imagined map of my Fontainebleau. Just as Denecourt had done with his featured trails in the previous century.



Year after year, with a sketchbook and the trusty canary, I set off into the oak and pines and birch, like so many before, but into my own imagination of the place. I couldn't map every stone and boulder problem, I had to imagine what would be useful for someone visiting the forest for a first time, what would help them navigate through a natural chaos. What was a landmark? What could be erased from relevance? What was remote; what accessible?

Relativity is all, and thankfully Fontainebleau already has an in-situ mapping of colour-coded paths (thankyou, Claude-Francois Denecourt!) and a recent culture of painting numbered circuit problems on the boulders. My IGN map of Fontainebleau is ragged and holed in the creases from constant folding. I grew to love those little aluminium signs nailed to trees, stencilled with the old crossroads and bridleways of the forest - Chemin du Bois Rond, Chemin de la Vallee Close, Carrefour du Bas Breau . . .  and so one, they all interconnected and gradually I encircled my empty spaces on the  paper.

Road maps I drew with to magnetic north, to avoid confusion between separate maps, but down at the micro-level, amongst the trees, north and south are meaningless, so each map can be orientated whichever way you like, you just need a frame of reference.  I stuck to the approach paths as frames of reference, marking the stones as I found them on the direction of approach, keeping the book page in line with the walking climber. Stomping into Potala, for example, the classic orange circuit appears at the base of the page as you suddenly emerge from the woods onto a sandy clearing and glowing, pristine ochre walls.  


  I know that the page becomes the map . . .  the blankness feels its way into meaning, this block narrows against this one, round the back should be red 22, follow the corridor, turn left, there it is, the canary wheels high above, re-orientates . . .  the small figure far below, under the canopy, moves off again . . .  the forest landscapes of Fontainebleau appear like castles in a pop-up book of wizardry.



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#60 Stone Country 'Bouldering in Scotland' news
November 15, 2011, 12:00:08 pm
Stone Country 'Bouldering in Scotland' news
15 November 2011, 10:52 am

   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 mainland ferry ports (eg. Arran will be in Central & South, Mull in Central Highlands) and the guides will be see a complete design overhaul. They'll feature photos from local photographers and activists, complete problem listings, photo topos, all-new maps and access notes, and of course, hundreds of new stones and venues developed since the gazetteer edition of 2008. Areas which feature new and exciting problems include: Torridon, Sheigra, Reiff, Aberdeen sea-cliffs, Glen Nevis, Galloway, Strathconon, Laggan, Trossachs, Dumbarton (of course), Shelterstone, Arran and a lot more!

The topos on the new site are free to download but are copyright of their authors, so please use them for personal use only. In many cases they require significant updates, so if you want to get in touch to tell us what you've done, please do so!

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#61 Angus Glens bouldering
December 15, 2011, 06:00:06 pm
Angus Glens bouldering
15 December 2011, 5:26 pm

  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!



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#62 Boulder Britain - a bolder guide
December 23, 2011, 06:00:14 pm
Boulder Britain -  a bolder guide
23 December 2011, 5:50 pm

         

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 task and Niall has performed miracles of editorial concision to give us the best each venue has to offer. The variety of bouldering represented is terrific, you get a real taste of Britain's geological smorgasbord, and the 180 venues have over 3,200 classic problems described with clean, sunny topos and clear approach maps.

Not only does the guide do what a guide is supposed to do, it is perhaps the most entertainingly written climbing guide I have ever picked up. Each page will raise a smile - just reading the history of the Langdale boulders will give you a taste of how refreshingly free from earnest, grade-chasing, navel-gazing is this book...bouldering is meant to be fun and Niall seems to have understood that message. Whether you are a solitary, heather-tramping, mat-hauler or a communal, gritstone Sunday picnicker, the guide covers all tastes and communicates the various characters of our rocks and our strange fascination  with pebble pilates.

The production quality is to die for and Niall has no doubt spent many long nights embedded in the intricacies of Adobe software, or howling at the moon when a lovingly traced map crashes without a save... the sheer bloody-mindedness needed to produce something this good-looking would put creationists to shame: it is a sophisticated, technicolour creature that has evolved fully-formed out of the primordial swamps, magma chambers and silent seabeds of our geological past.

Of course, it is a book produced by the 'community of the realm' of boulderers and woudn't exist but for the obscure passion of multifarious souls who ditch all to huddle sniffling under a damp overhang waiting for a few square inches of rock to dry. Niall rightly sets the book in this context and, as some kind of beneficient overseer or scribe, has diligently pulled it all together into a biblical work of dedication. This 'good book' should really be the one handed out at Sunday schools around the country - go forth and clamber upon rocks, take thee this bible... perform your stations...

Amazing what a little paper, ink and a stony curiosity can produce - well done Niall, this book is all the richer for you taking it on. I am going for a long bath, and I may be some time... three cheers for Ape Index!

Support the poor wretch who went blind and starved and withered to bring you this feast:

Boulder Britain - what £25 was made for  

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#63 Northwest New Year
January 08, 2012, 12:00:12 pm
Northwest New Year
8 January 2012, 11:37 am

   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.



Corrieshalloch Gorge was the most impressive feature, in full flow and pretending (bar a few tens of degrees) to be something out of a tropical Jurassic period...



So on to 2012, we are due a high pressure or two and dare I say it, I am sick of the sight of the TCA!



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#64 Losing the apostrophe on Ben A'an
January 08, 2012, 06:00:10 pm
Losing the apostrophe on Ben A'an
8 January 2012, 12:19 pm

 



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 hills otherwise. Timothy Pont's maps all had Gaelic names mis-translated into the more restrictive throat of English and to this day the English alphabet struggles to suggest the richness of the timbre in Gaelic, hence maybe the guilt over Ben An and the adding of the apostrophe. Older maps of the peak bracket it as 'Binnein' and we should stick to this, or 'Am Binnean'. If we do have to anglicize it, just go the whole hog and call it Ben An, with no mysterious and confusing retro-Gaelicization.

It was well windy up here on the 7th January and at the top, struggling hard to keep the camera steady, I could feel all those apostrophes flying uselessly through the air...





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#65 Craigmaddie in wellies
January 13, 2012, 06:00:05 pm
Craigmaddie in wellies
13 January 2012, 4:26 pm

    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 an overlay of millstone quarrying. I found some interesting symbols under the big roof, mason marks of all sorts, next to the names A. Cairns and J.Neilson and an unfinished 18** date inscribed on the rock. Must check Bardowie cemeteries for masons...

 Cogwheel pits  

On the plateau are dozens of quarried 'cogwheel' pits distinctive of millstone quarrying. Holes would have been flooded with water and wooden splints inserted under the semi-carved stones. The water would swell the wooden wedges and snap off fully-formed millstones. The quarriers also had a mischievous bent, as there are 'fairy' carvings all over the place, including an Egyptian-style 'eye', a gnomon circle (or millstone peck-tracing), mason marks, names, mysterious 'H' marks, faces on the Auld Wives Lifts (and lots of Victorian graffiti), and even a 'fairy footprint' in the rock, a bit like the King's Footprint at Dunadd, but obviously moulded on a size 6 welly boot... or perhaps this was the ancient seat of a lost kingdom?  I still haven't found the reputed serpent carved in a plinth and reported in an old archaeological survey.

 Fairy welly print...  



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#66 February - Blue Skies at Craigmaddie
February 03, 2012, 12:00:11 am
February - Blue Skies at Craigmaddie
2 February 2012, 7:00 pm

       

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.





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#67 In search of The Murder Hole
February 26, 2012, 12:00:14 pm
In search of The Murder Hole
26 February 2012, 9:18 am

 

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, and there, not twenty yards before me, like a hideous black demon's eye looking up at me, lay the unplumbed depths of the Murder Hole...'

The watery hole that Samuel Crockett refers to in his adventure tale is indeed a looped bay of peaty, black water of no insignificant depth of around 105 ft (32 metres). This was measured by the hillwalker J.McBain, author of the 1929 book 'The Merrick and the Neighbouring Hills - Tramps by Hill, Stream and Loch', by the bold method of tiptoeing out onto winter ice, cutting a hole and dropping a plumb-line.  

Murder is an integral theme of these hills. The name Buchan (as in Buchan Hill, Dungeon of Buchan, Buchan Burn etc.) refers to the Earl of Buchan -  a relative of John Comyn 'The Red', who was murdered by Robert Bruce on consecrated ground in a Dumfries chapel in 1306, as part of a long-running feud over land-ownership and rights to the crown between the Balliol-backed Comyns and the Bruce dynasty. Bruce's subsequent guerrilla war against Edward I and II included a victory at Glen Trool in 1307, and nearby Claterringshaws, which set him on his way to eventual coronation after Bannockburn, 8 years later.  

 

The naming of remote, moorland 'murder holes' (there are others Galloway) is most likely a reference to murders perpetrated during the 'Killing Time' of the 1680s when Charles II and then James II brought murderous penalty to the cause of being a Covenanter and daring to interpret one's religion without a suitable intermediary (or spiritual landlord called a Bishop or Pope!). The religious persecution led to many high-profile deaths, but also many unrecorded but well-kent practices of murder in the Presbyterian south-west. Oral history relates tales of shepherds who would report finding murdered bodies on the moors, dumped in gullies or lochans or on the heather where they fell.  

 

Which brings me to another possible toponymical interpretation of 'Murder Hole' and its actual physical feature in the landscape. Just above the entrance of the burn into Loch Neldricken, where the OS map notes the water feature of the Murder Hole, lies a distinct granite passageway (a geological fault) through which the burn pools and rumbles. You can stand on its edge and look down into its rocky throat and imagine it as a perfect 'murder hole' into which bodies could be dumped. Medieval castles often had a narrow passageway built leading to the main gate, with windows above known as 'murder holes', through which to fire arrows or pour pitch onto unsuspecting, or simply unfortunate, soldiers. So is this feature the original 'murder hole', before Crockett misinterpreted and fictionalized the deep pool of murder nearby?  



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Stone Play 2 - The Art of Bouldering revisited
5 March 2012, 7:26 pm

 

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-experience of the boulder problem. New articles have been gathered, original writings will appear at length, and the whole book is being given a fresh edit. Also, the format of the book is changing. We are producing a limited edition hardback at a reasonable price followed by an e-book, so keep an eye out in 2012 for the new edition!

This is all ahead of publishing an exciting new book on the philosophy of bouldering by US-based boulderer and thinker Francis Sanzaro - more on this remarkable writer soon . . .



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#69 Glen Lednock
April 03, 2012, 10:36:43 am
Glen Lednock
19 March 2012, 2:44 pm

 

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



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#70 Spring 2012
April 11, 2012, 07:00:11 pm
Spring 2012
11 April 2012, 5:29 pm

   Dumby... as the days lengthen and improve, so the litter grows! The place may be a mess and a hopeless example of citizenship, but hell, the bouldering is good and folk are getting out on their projects! Good to see Johnny Bean back climbing after his illness, plus some new fresh faces getting the psyche for the place, that's encouraging...

The rock has dried, the chalk grows like a white fungus and still there are new problems to be found. I took advantage of some cool spring weather to work my nemesis of Pongo Sit and did a few new problems. One in particular is a cracker and a 'project' I had stared at for years but never actually tried - the wee groove left of Kev's problem went via a bizarre but pleasing dyno to jugs. It feels utterly impossible until you throw for the lip, the wild swing from the jugs just feels magic when you latch it.

At Craigmore, the recent dry spell brought out the boulderers, but it appears someone is a little too eager with their cleaning and has gone a bit ape-shit with their saws - some trees were chopped and this is utterly unacceptable. Careful cleaning of holds is fine, but wholesale Napalming is not, nor is there any need to chop or even prune trees...they just don't get in the way of the problems, certainly not the worthwhile problems. And no problem, especially the shitty problems, are worth sacrificing 20 years or more worth of growing...

Anyway, rant over, here are the three versions of the Terror Problem explained in a vid. The project of the main face via the left hand on the crimp is still to be done...



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#71 French Impressionism
May 03, 2012, 07:00:13 pm
French Impressionism
3 May 2012, 3:10 pm

 

Fontainebleau again. Encore une fois. The more I visit, the more it impresses, and the more it grows its mental skins. I am becoming a Fontainebleau 'oignon', if not quite a 'bleausard' - layers of memory, repeated climbs, new areas, the dappled light, the sounds of the place; all co-mingled into an impressionistic mess of sensation that bangs an emotional gong when I hear the word 'forest'. Even injured and unable to climb, I am happy to let it soak in again, like a sudden April shower.

It was indeed a wet spring, with the forest lashed by the dirty tail of Atlantic fronts soaking northern Europe - a ragged, out-of-the-ocean dog-shake of a low pressure system. We sloughed off the Euro-glitz of Paris, not to mention the 8-Euro a pint nonsense and retired to a hut in the forest. We visited the market in Milly-la-Forêt and stocked up for a spell of natural impressionism, with respectably priced Grand Vins from la Coccinelle, then long evenings of blurred masterpieces of forest light.



With the weather wet, it was a real opportunity to explore some areas of the forest: the 'mini-Scotland' of Coquibus heath reminded me of Corot and Rousseau's winding, sandy tracks under stormy skies; the rocky plateaux and mature canopies of the Franchard gorges, now so much more overgrown than the 'deserts' of 19th Century postcards (the Napoleonic wars and charcoal burners had stripped the place to a rock-garden); the fancy galleries, museums and 'maisons forets' of Barbizon; the sleepy bridges and baguette-hungry ducks of Grez-sur-Loing; the rifle-crack ranges and pistes-cavaliers of Corne-Biche. The whole, vast matrix of the forest - the 'lungs' of Paris - breathes quietly from another century while the hyper-tensive artery of the A6 throbs through the core of the place, yet still the forest springs into life each year, the green leaves eager to shush modernity's clamour. There are constant surprises - what I think is a crow suddenly climbing a tree trunk is a giant black woodpecker; a psychedelic flash in the leaf litter is a green lizard; and a little mini-boulder turns out to be a twitchy giant snail, folding shyly back into itself like a plastic bag in a fire.



 

 

I did some mapping, my own peculiar cartographies of rock. Despite compass, GPS and aerial photography, the best way to map a chaos of boulders is simply to walk round about them for a week, linking up the circuit numbers and doing bird's-eye imaginings from above. Each time I visit, there are more polished, clean slopers of new problems, and the low, chalky rubrics of desperate sit starts. It is remarkable how often you confuse one boulder for two - so many facets and only one perspective - the whole process is like doing a jigsaw with replicate pieces, gradually melding the drafts into tighter circles, merging walls and corners like a Rubik's cube, linking up perspectives and joining the old, sly logics of circuits into their intended stations. I appreciate circuits more and more; they are discreet passages of climbing philosophy, a kind of monkish addiction.



There are a lot of good guides and maps out there but it makes me smile to see how everyone interprets the boulders... it's such a subjective art. Look how differently Bart van Raaj interprets an area in 7+8 (clever use of minimalism) compared to the holistic depth of Jo Montchausse (his 'complete Cuvier' map for three Euro, available in Decathlon at the Carrefour, must be the best value-for-money topo ever produced!). It all depends what you wish to bring to the attention of the wanderer - Denecourt had the same inspiration and the same dilemma, and no doubt he walked many routes in combination before committing to his little blue paint pot.

Reassuringly, people climb. Most of the guidebooks I see end up flapping in the wind on a flat boulder, rifling their own maps like inaccurate dreams, as they should; or they sit face down on the sand, oblivious, traversed by ants, as we chalk up and slap hands together, then begin to boulder...





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#72 Before the rain in Mull
May 17, 2012, 01:00:08 pm
Before the rain in Mull
17 May 2012, 8:17 am

 

       



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#73 New Arran Blocs
May 22, 2012, 01:00:20 pm
New Arran Blocs
22 May 2012, 6:39 am

 

  Simon working the big roof...  

Arran is a like a big granite lump of dough that someone has pushed an icy thumb into several times - the big corries pinch out the crusty ridges and the crumbs have all tumbled down into the bowls, trailed out in long deposits by the slabbery dribble of glaciers. The fringe of the island is dotted with big erratics that have tried to make it to the sea, such as the 'Corrie' boulders, but the densest collection of rocks lies in the higher corries such as Fionn corrie, Garbh corrie and Coire nan Ceum.



Coire nan Ceum...just a few of the blocs!

We took the opportunity of a good forecast to get the first sunburn of the year with a hike into Coire nan Ceum, via the bounciest bus on the island (the 324), then a pleasant stomp up the North Sannox burn to the boulderfield (45 min). Folk have mentioned this place to me over the years, Claire Youdale had said there were some big stones, and she wasn't wrong. The vast territory of rocks is a maze to navigate - a bit of a geological Narnia, everyone scattered through their own wardrobes of fascination to hunt for their projects.

We regrouped and decided to start at the top, at the biggest blocs, then work downhill along the vanished glacier's rocky scribble. The granite is ultrabasic in nature and fierce on the fingers, so failing repeatedly on roof projects leaves the skin tattered. Warming up on slabs, shredding toes rather than hands, then doing a few quality 'circuit' problems between Font 4 and 6a, warmed us up for the harder lines and the most attractive roof problems.

The granite-pure waters tumbling under and around the boulders were ideal for cooling throbbing tips and toes. A pint in the Sannox Hotel was just reward for a hard-fought collection of classic new problems. The area will feature in the new Bouldering Guide to Scotland - Volume 1...

 Simon on the slabs...  

  The end of the day...



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#74 Some Scottish Bouldering News 2012
May 25, 2012, 01:00:09 pm
Some Scottish Bouldering News 2012
25 May 2012, 8:04 am

   

Some news from the travelling band...  

May 2012  

Greg Chapman of LakesBloc and Rock and Run has been busy exploring in the Ross of Mull, adding the hardest problems to date on the superb pink granite that pokes out from under Mull's tertiary lavas around Fionnphort. His two best finds were both 7c+ on steep prows north-east of Kintra. Many other walls and problems are being developed, with exciting new stones to be revealed soon! It's good to see such plum lines finding attention - Mull is full of potential for everyone. Check the Mull page for a sample Google map of some areas.  

                     

April 2012  

Dominic Ward has done some cracking new problems high up on the Bealach na Ba at Applecross: a new direct problem on the Sanctuary Cave (Kneed for Sanctuary), and a new crag called the Sia Stone has given some quality problems. Nic has kindly donated a topo for the area on the Applecross page, he'd appreciate some feedback, and maybe some traffic on these stones! Cheers, Nic.  

                                                                   

March 2012  

Dave MacLeod has succeeded on his long term project on the Skeleton Boulder in Glen Nevis. He climbed the project just before a bouldering trip to Switzerland, where he climbed  Mystic Stylez, 8c.  

Commenting on his new problem Natural Method, he said it was the '...Hardest thing I've one this year by a mile!'  Dave has suggested 8b+ as a grade. I'm sure the Swiss experience, on similarly-styled rock to Glen Nevis, allowed him to contextualize the grade. It just looks superb, full of intricate and, of course, very powerful moves. Dave explains in his blog how the climb was a return to the 'natural method' of improving bouldering by bouldering lots!



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