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Buy the Bouldering in Ireland ebook
As the first edition of Bouldering in Ireland guidebook is sold out, I'm making an ebook (PDF) version available to purchase for €5 (about $6.25 or £4) which will enable purchasers to print out the guide and view it on their computer or phone. I've also added details of the new problems submitted since the guide went to print.
The file isn't protected, I'm trusting/hoping that you climbers will do the right thing, I think it's worth the price of a pint.
The Bouldering in Ireland guidebook details all the major and minor bouldering areas across the length and breadth of the island of Ireland including Glendalough and The Wicklow Mountains, The Reeks, The Burren, Connemara, North West Donegal, Inishowen Peninsula, Fair Head, The Mournes and many more.
- Over 1700 problems in 90 areas
- From Font 3 to 8b
- Granite, gritstone, gabbro, limestone, sandstone, schist, quartzite and dolerite
- 100 maps, 140 photo-topos and detailed directions to get you to the problems
- Over 150 colour photos of the best problems
- 256 pages of full color in an A5 landscape format
- Contains areas that have never been documented before.
Finalist in the 2011 Banff mountain book competition.
Reviews: UkClimbing, UkBouldering, North Wales Bouldering, Stone Country
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Bouldering in Sweden by Michael O'Dwyer
Voices in the Forest by John Watson
Essential Fontainebleau Review by Dave Flanagan
First Ascents by Dave Flanagan
Stone Play: review and interview by Dave Flanagan
Friction by Dave Flanagan
8a in 9 simple steps by Dave Flanagan
DVD review by Dave Flanagan
Introduction to bouldering in Glendalough by Dave Flanagan
Michael Reardon's second visit to Ireland By Michael Reardon
Blackrock bouldering by PeterTom McMahon
At Glendalough by Mick Ward
Introduction to bouldering in Ireland by Dave Flanagan
Le French Glendo - Targassonne by Pierre Fuentes
Bouldering with Goats by Chris Redmond
Gap Of Dunloe by Nigel Callender
Injury prevention - Shoulder by Nigel Callender
A cheaters guide to Glendalough By Dave Flanagan
First visit to Ireland By Michael Reardon
Dawros Head By John Watson
Working Class By Pete Kirton
Stone Country - bouldering in Scotland Review
Bouldering in Fairhead By Ricky Bell and Ali Wilson.
A beginners guide to bouldering
Information about Bouldering in Fontainebleau
How Bouldering Turned Me Blind by John Watson.
The Medium by Niall Grimes.
Bouldering for real climbers by Stephen McMullan.
Common Ground by Niall Grimes.
Understanding Movement and The Bear of Little Brain by Si O'Conor.
Interview with bouldering legend John Gill
Review of the North Wales bouldering guide
...more ArchivesTo make matters worse, I'm not even a boulderer. It's a depressing conclusion, because for several years I did think of myself as a climber and tried really hard to be one. First I tried, and then I pretended. And now it is so glaringly obvious that I cannot even pretend anymore. But if I'm not a climber, I have to answer two crucial questions: First - what exactly is a climber? And second - what the hell am I instead?
But let me explain how I got into this mess. Although gravity and the fight against it played a significant role in my life since early childhood, I didn't consider myself a climber until quite recently. I climbed mountains by walking, crawling or cycling, I even lived in a 4th floor apartment without elevator, but actual climbing was alien to me. I kind of knew it existed, but I ignored it. When I started sports climbing in 2005, it was mostly because I fell into an unexpected hole of loneliness after having moved to Toronto, and the climbing gym had people. Lots of them.* When I moved back to Europe two years later, I toproped everything up to 10.d, led up to 10.a (that's F6a, for non-Americans), and had a ruptured tendon in the left middle finger. I was, for a short time, a climber.
Bivy spot on Cruit Island, apparently a great place for climbing
The next three years I didn't climb very often. I lived in Scotland, everything around me was trad or ice, and I just thought that's not my thing. If they want to climb trad, fine, but I will wait until Scotland has moved 20 degrees further south and developed some bolted limestone cliffs. Sure, this might take a while, but I have time and plate tectonics cannot be denied, not even by Scottish trad climbers. I patiently waited for sports climbing to arrive. I drank a lot of tea.
It's not that I actively despise trad climbing. But I'm not good at owning and organising items and constantly forget the three things I really need at the office. Besides, at the core of my soul I am a loner and cannot stand having people around me, not even belayers. This makes me awfully unfit for trad climbing. Bouldering has much more appeal, so I thought, and indeed, I played on a few rubbish boulders on various continents while travelling and it was good fun. I was also attracted by free soloing, clearly the purest, most beautiful form of climbing, but at the core of my soul I'm also scared shitless. It didn't look good for my climbing career, but I wasn't ready yet to see it.
The first two things I discovered after moving to Dublin were the social welfare office and Michael Duffy's bouldering co-op, the smallest climbing gym on Earth. What a fantastic place. Really. Everything was overhanging, everything was hard, and I could only use the 10 biggest holds, but what a place. Dark, cold, dirty, the smell of sweat, chalk, mould, and urine, hidden somewhere in a garage in an alley in south Dublin. A few months in this paradise, so I thought, would turn me into back into the climber I once was and then some. The future was bright.
The legendary bouldering co-op.
This was December 2009. I lost it in the year 2010. It's difficult to say when exactly it happened. It might have been an afternoon in March, when I left the co-op with burning forearms after 60 minutes of traversing on easy holds. Something is wrong, I thought. Stripped from the social context and the stupid ambition to reach the next grade, then the next, and so on, I lost track of what I actually wanted. What climbing actually meant for me. I made some progress getting back on track when I found the limestone traverses under the Milltown LUAS bridge and the extremely long seawall traverse at White Rock, figuring out the intrinsic challenge of sticking to a piece of vertial rock, balancing the various body parts**, exploiting the texture and friction of the rock. Just sticking to the wall. I still like this feeling. But I don't think this makes me a climber. Not anymore.
Because climbing is not just about touching rocks. Climbing is a sport, a game if you want, and as a game it has a framework of rules that tell you what to do. In contrast to games like chess and football, climbing rules are rarely written down, and if they are, they are called 'ethics', rather interestingly. Take for example the endless debates about bolting or not bolting which in the end come down to the question what kind of game people want to play - a complicated social, historical, and necessarily subjective question. Each type of climbing has its own set of rules, and if you want to be a climber, you accept at least one of these sets. It's not very difficult, either. But the moment you do this, the perception changes. You see the world with different eyes.
The crux of the Milltown traverse is on the right side.
This is not obvious and not trivial. Here is the test: Stand in front of a rock wall and tell me what you see. Any normal person will probably say something about colour or shape of the wall and then change the subject. A geologist will say something about schist, the Caledonian orogeny and possible negative gravity anomalies. The climber on the other hand will quickly point out the crack with good handholds or the difficult roof section or the fact that there is no way in hell anybody could go up this blank face without a piton.
It's pattern recognition - you compare everything you see in the mountains against a set of pattern stored in your brain, and because you are a climber, these pattern consist of routes and problems, in guidebooks usually shown as red lines on top of a rock face. The boulderer sees the 6a arrete, where other people just look at the edge of a rock. He sees microcrimps where other people just see some weird structures. Every feature of the rock is interpreted as a possible part of a route.
But here is the thing: The red lines in the guidebooks - the 6a arrete, the roof problem, the handholds, the microcrimps - do not exist out there. The rocks don't know anything about microcrimps. They don't know what constitutes a good boulder problem or a quality slab route. These are all concepts, nice concepts, admittedly, but nonetheless concepts that we made up to play a game. In essence, a climber doesn't climb the rock, he climbs a concept in his mind. Or in the mind of someone who wrote the guidebook, who in turn was affected by the minds of thousands of climbers before him. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with climbing a concept. It's just important to be clear.
Because here is what I see when I look at the aforementioned rock wall. Three things: First, I'm impressed. Second, I think about an imaginary climber, say, Reinhold Messner, scaling the difficult chimney or some other feature in the center of the wall. And third, I try to figure out a way how to get up the hill without actually climbing the wall. The easiest way, not the hardest. The weakness of the mountain or the boulder or whatever it is. Which is an interesting exercise, it's just not climbing. It might also be chickening out, but who knows. While I see the same features a climber sees, I don't want to play his game.
Red dots on the Ghost slab in Dalkey Quarry.
Dave MacLeod, one of my superheros, wrote this rather stunning sentence in a blogpost: The medium of movement on rock allows us to crack open the beauty of rock not fully visible to the eye and get more back. I think he is right, climbing allows people - the climber and everybody who watches the youtube videos later on - to access a different dimension to the rock. I just think this dimension is not out there, it's in our minds. That's why it is invisible. Because I can see the three dimensional structure of the rock, what I can't see is the route - I need the climber to make this concept of a route visible.
The climber sees routes as the stargazer sees constellation on the night sky. This type of specialised, trained pattern recognition has a lot of advantages. It makes it interesting to look at something that might seem dull and featureless for the untrained eye. A climber, as far as I understand it, can spend hours analysing a small piece of rock. During these hours, he sort of communicates with the wall, ideas are bouncing back and forth between the climber and the wall. A mental picture of the wall is formed in the mind of the climber. In a sense, the climber recreates the wall in his mind. What used to be an arbitrary geological structure on some arbitrary planet, becomes a specific, emotionally laden sequence of information in the conscious mind of a human being. The wall has become a story.***
The great smelling boulders of Mullaghdoo.
But back to my story. In January 2011 I moved to Dalkey, partly to be closer to a lot of rock, a desperate attempt to be a climber. True, now I'm spending a lot of time in the quarry and at Bullock harbour, I'm just not climbing. I stare at the rock, I stare a lot, I memorize some of the routes, and sometimes I do a few moves at the traverse wall or I scramble a bit on a crack. Then I start staring again. I also realised that granite is really hard when you bang your knee against it. I guess you could call this sort of thing climbing, but you definitely don't need climbing shoes for that. If you're a climber, a really aesthetic piece of rock - you just want to climb it, because it looks brilliant. That's Dave MacLeod talking, not me. I don't have that, at least not to the extent that I want to do it myself. I don't see routes and problems and the associated rules of climbing as part of my future. I mostly think it would be great if some other people could climb it, and mostly they do. Which is extremely gratifying. You guys are doing a good job, for me and for the rest of us non-climbers.
The final step in my journey to not climbing was ordering Dave Flanagan's fantastic bouldering guide for Ireland. Although I didn't know that at the time. I was still under the impression that I just need to find the right kind of rocks, maybe some soft, warm rocks, to solve my identity crisis. If you don't have this book, you should immediately buy it, even if you are not a climber. These days, I have it mostly on my coffee table and when I get home in the evening, I browse through the pages, wonder how it would feel like to climb 'Contact', marvel at the brilliant images of Thur Mountain, and just relax. Sometimes I use the guide to plan trips to interesting looking areas.**** But I don't carry it with me anymore.
Because, to say it again, I'm not a boulderer. Sure, I tried some easy climbs in Carrickfinn, Loch Bray, and in Portrane. I did a handful of the problems from Dave's beginner circuit in Carrigshouk, in a cloud of flies and midges. But after I'd tried this random 5er slab problem for the fifth time, I lost interest. I just didn't see the point, because, frankly, there is no point. I climbed Carrigshouk, the mountain, instead, still followed by the flies. Fucking flies.
Lough Bray, Lakeside Boulder, great for sunbathing.
If climbing is a specific type of pattern recognition, and if it is clear that I don't see routes and problems, at least not as things that might occupy me in the future, it would be interesting to know what kind of pattern interests me instead. I guess I do see lines, tops and bivy spots on mountains, probably as a result from climbing some 200 hills over the last fives years. So, with some good will I might actually be a mountaineer. But I also see lines through bogs and swamps, and since I don't want to be a bog expert, I cannot claim to be a mountaineer either. To me, finding lines up a mountain is like climbing - just a technique, a means to an end, a device to get to a different place. And I'm grateful to have at least some climbing technique, otherwise I would never have seen places like Lord Berkeley's seat on An Teallach. But I'm not out there to climb, or to find lines.
At this point I'm not even sure that I see any type of pattern out there. Most of the time, I just want to see something that is new, to me at least. Every turn in the path, every structure in the slope of the hill, every forest hides something from my world view, and I really need to see what it is. It's really important to me. I admit it's a cheap instinct, a bit like clicking on links on the internet for hours and hours. And I guess I'm also looking for the experience of doing this alone, of escaping civilisation, for a few hours or days. I'm not sure how I should call a person like that. In my best moments, I could be an explorer, like Amundsen or Magellan. In the worst moments, I'm just a vagabond. Somewhere in between are the moments when I accidentally find a nice looking boulder and try to figure out how it feels like, how it smells and what its taste is.*****
But what I don't understand and very much like to understand is how this all happens. What makes person X a climber and person Y a limping rambler with foul-smelling shoes, surrounded by a cloud of insects. Was there a point in time where in theory I could have become a climber? What kind of circumstances are needed for this to happen? Or am I destined or specifically talented to just wander around, aimlessly, trying to look into another valley? It has taken several years to figure out what I am. Now I just need to find out why.
One has to wonder what cows say about all this.
* Many of them women in tight shirts.
** The human body has surprisingly many different parts.
*** This is not far away from the way a scientist works. He, too, makes an attempt to recognise pattern in the world - pattern that we later call laws of nature - and while doing so, he becomes intimately familiar with certain things in the world. It's a bit like marriage, just different.
**** Which is an interesting point, because I'm sure Dave didn't intend to write a tourist guide. But this is what happens when you write a book about a country. You put red dots on the mental map and affect people's experiences. Dave is not just changing our perception of boulders, he might also change our perception of the country. That's not a bad thing, without the guide I would have never found the secluded beach in Mullaghdoo, and I had a great nap there, right next to the boulder. It's just unexpected. And slightly scary.
***** Using the old-fashioned cultural technique of licking.
Ricky Bell has climbed the sit start to the incredible hanging prow on the Brought to you by the letter M boulder in Murlough Bay, Fair Head. It's called Spindle 8a.
Spindle from Tops Off 4POWER on Vimeo.
Rob Hunter just got in touch to say that his labour of love the first ever bouldering guide to Fair Head is almost ready to go to the printers. Rob who has been bouldering at the Head for 15 years and must have done hundreds of first ascents has spent the last three months putting the guide together. The guide will consist of over 200 pages with detailed topos of 12 areas. And over 450 problems including steep power problems, aretes, prows and slabs with grades ranging from 3 - 8a and there is still plenty of scope for further development.
When you think that my guide only documents 60 problems, it's obvious Rob has been busy in the last few years.
Gets the latest on the Fair Head Bouldering facebook page or discuss it here
Enter the Dragon 8a. Photo: Rob Hunter collection.
Niall Grimes aka Grimer has written a bouldering guide covering England, Scotland and Wales. A massive undertaking which, understandably, took him years.
If you've never heard of Grimer or read any of his work you will be surprised when you take a quick flick through this book and find yourself laughing out loud. Humour is not the first thing most people associate with guides, even bouldering ones. Grimer would be the first to acknowledge it’s not the most important thing either
Here’s his bio from boulderbritain.com
“Niall Grimes has been a writer, photographer and public speaker for almost 15 years. He has been a regular contributor to climbing magazines worldwide, including High, Summit, On the Edge and Climb (UK), Rock and Ice and Climbing (US), Klettern (Germany) and the Irish Mountain Log.
The last ten years has seen him co-ordinate guidebooks for the British Mountaineering Council and he was responsible for the Burbage, Millstone and Beyond guide which won the Mountain Exposition Award at the Banff Mountain Book Festival in 2006. In 2009 he won the Grand Prize at Banff for the book Revelations, co-authored with Jerry Moffatt.
Niall grew up in Derry, Northern Ireland, and began climbing in 1986. After several years spent on his local Irish crags, exploring and new routing in his favourite area, Donegal, he left to climb further afield. After stints in France, Spain, America and the Himalaya, he moved to Sheffield, on the edge of the Peak District, where he lives to this day.
He has climbed extensively, both at home and abroad, enjoying all facets of the sport. He has led up to E8 on traditional routes and bouldered up to 7B+, as well as new routing expeditions to Greenland and Kyrgyzstan.”
Having bouldered at only a tiny fraction of the areas in the book I can’t really comment on the quality of the directions and maps, but considering Grimer’s background as Guidebook Co-ordinator for the BMC (British Mountaineering Council), I have no doubt they are impeccable.
For my money Grimer is one of the very best climbing writers, his work has a bit of depth to it without being sappy and very funny. The short stories he wrote years ago for High and OTE are amazing (two of which he kindly allowed me reproduce on this site here here). This writing ability shines through this guide. Having written a similar guide (well they are both about bouldering) I know the pain of writing introduction and acknowledgments and all that shite but he does it with flair, for example in the intro to the Graded List he said
“Don’t take this too seriously. In fact, if you find yourself in a third world country suddenly under attack from a violent intestinal bug then these should be the first pages to go. To be honest, they are just randomly distributed through their grades with a few of the cooler ones at the top of each set. If any are right then don’t hesitate in letting me know. But still it fills a few pages, and you can’t argue with that.”
The book itself is A5 portrait (to paraphrase the man, a triumph of function over form) with 443 glossy pages. It’s hefty but that’s ok. It contains details of 3200 problems in 180 areas. It’s a lovely book to flick through as there is such a diversity of climbing situations, rock types and shapes.
By it’s very nature the details and topos are minimal, the focus is on getting you to the boulders. To be honest some of the areas look a bit shite but having written a bouldering guide with some shite areas in it I can say that there is a good reason for including them. They can be quite pleasant and very useful when you have a meeting down the road or ‘stumble’ across them on a family walk. In fact I wish there were a few shite areas near my house.
The photos are great, strong colours and sharp. I can’t help noticing there are plenty of shots of women which is nice as a lot of bouldering guides are sausage fests. They must all find themselves attracted to his soft brogue.
Anyone with more than a passing interest in bouldering who spends any time in the UK should pick up a copy of this book. Buy it from boulderbritain.com for £25.
Ricky Bell has climbed the sit start to the incredible hanging prow on the Brought to you by the letter M boulder in Murlough Bay, Fair Head. It's called Spindle 8a.
He has been exploring deeper into the scree where he climbed some new problems, topo to follow.
He also did a low stand/crouch start on the arete to the right of Missing In Action which it finishes up, called SuperExtra 7C.
Discuss it here
Now that the guidebook is sold out I have make it available for download as a ebook/PDF. The cost is a mere €5 (about $6.25 or £4). Print it off or keep a copy on your phone. I'm hoping that people will buy it rather than get a copy from their mate.
Discuss it here
"'Angry' Dan, Ben and Jon Freeman went over to Ireland for the 3 day Bouldering meet. Did a few classics and added a couple of new lines. Ticklist: (in order of appearance) Tanked- Glendasan Leftism- Glendalough Mountain out of a Mall Hill (FA ss Mall rats)- Mall Hill Straight outta Carrock (FA Right Arete of Mall rats Block)- Mall Hill Dice Rib Proj- Glenmacnass"
Discuss it here
Barry started his summer season with a repeat of the hard classic, Leviathan in Portrane. Probably the 4th ascent after Johnny Argue, Michael Duffy and John Howard. Shot and edited by Chris Rooney and Dan.
Discuss it here
Shot and edited by Michael Duffy and Ricky Bell this video shows Michael's ascents of most of Ireland's hardest problems.
Discuss it here
Richard Creagh shot this video on the Saturday of the Kerry Climbing Meet.
This one is by Barry O'Dwyer from the Sunday of the Kerry Climbing Meet.
Discuss it here
Ricky Bell is giving a slideshow this Thursday (19th) in Awesome Walls. See www.awesonewalls.ie for more information.
Discuss it here
Anyone who hasn't got a copy of the Irish bouldering guidebook better move fast as there is only 20 copies left.
The plan at the moment is to do a second edition in a few years rather than a straight reprint. I'm considering some sort of electronic version in the interim.
Discuss it here
Larger version here
Over the weekend 3 new problems were climbed in the Scalp. High up on the West side of the valley is a large boulder with a prominient arete and a faded tricolour painted on the face. Often looked at but it had a sloping landing. A group sorted the landing with branches from the forest and climbed 3 problems. The pick of the bunch Eyrie 6c highballs up the arete. Skewer 6a climbing the face on the left and Manical laugh 6? traverses into the arete from the left and takes it on the left hand side. First ascents by John Howard, John Howard and James Gernon.
The Scalp - Repeats and first ascents from Dave Ayton on Vimeo.
Discuss it here
I have updated the site finally. There is now a new Irish bouldering forum. There is a list of blogs related to Irish bouldering in the left column.
I'm going to try and keep the site updated with news, there seems to be a good bit going on at the moment. If you have any news or information about new problems or interesting ascents or nice video or photos post up on the forum.
