The Scoop is by far the most difficult “tick” of the 61 routes featured in the iconic book Hard Rock, rumoured to have been included by the mischievous Ken Wilson as a spoiler to stop people ticking the lot. The original A3 aid route was established in 1969 by Doug Scott and team, with over 30 hours of effort spread over a number of days. The route relies on the fixed gear, pegs and a couple of bolts, leftover from the original ascent and now severely degraded in the intervening half a century. Whilst free climbing hardware has evolved beyond recognition in the meantime, the nature of the rock doesn’t readily yield placements, and most of these are blocked by the rotting remnants of yesteryear. A more modern “Clean Aid” style, without placing new fixed gear using a hammer, would likely see a grade of C3+ or more (hard to know as there have only been a handful of reported repeats). Roll all that together, and then drop it on North Harris in the Outer Hebrides, at the very extremity of the British Isles, and you’ve set quite a challenge – no doubt Ken is chuckling as he looks down from his final airy belay ledge.

It was starting to look like my Scoop plan simply wasn’t going to happen this year. Ever since my end of May trip to Carnmore with Jim…

Dragon and Gob – Carnmore

… reduced my Hard Rock ticklist to just two routes, I’d been plotting a visit to the Outer Hebrides. Bill had quickly signed up for dedicating Episode 14 of Bill and Dom’s Excellent Adventures to the mission. Cruddy weather, including Storm Lillian, plus various side projects and commitments intervened leaving just the final possibility of a six-day window towards the end of September, before Helen and I headed to the US.

Annoyingly, the briefest of Indian Summers decided to show its face whilst Bill was in Turkey and then I was committed to CAC duties at the ABC conference in Sheffield.

Any vestige of a chance would require a surgical strike and a fair amount of good fortune. We decided to roll the dice regardless…

Friday 1pm leave Rotherham after my CAC pitch to the ABC conference.

Quick shower and change, then 3pm collection by Bill’s Cabs from home for a 6:30hrs drive to Craigallan, the Rucksack Club hut in Ballachulish for an overnight pitstop, pizza and pint. 4:30am alarm call for the reminder of the foggy journey across Skye to the Uig ferry terminal, to arrive at 8am – first in the ‘standby queue’ to hopefully get our vehicle on board the 9:50am sailing (which was fully booked for vehicles) with a back-up plan of dumping the car and going foot-passenger only.

Big bags packed in case we had to go on foot (though the ‘bags for life’ are just for effect, an homage to the Dawes/Pritchard film of the free ascent – we’d just about squeezed stuff into bulging sacks!)

9:30 am and the release of tension is palpable – we’re on! Green lights all the way (and kudos to CalMac – they really do have an excellent customer-centred flexible ticketing process. No change fees and really helpful staff).

No views of the departing Skye-scape or the approaching Hebrides – the crossing was swathed in thick fog and the only reason we knew we arrived was the sound of the engines going into reverse thrust. It’s a 45mins drive up to the start of the approach path, accessed via a track to a hydro power station. There’s a locked gate that was open (more green lights!) and we cheekily drove through, enabling us to drop bags up at the hydro dam before parking the car back outside the barrier, thus saving a couple of miles with 20kg loads on our backs. Still foggy but soon breaking through the cloud inversion.

It’s a gorgeous, undulating track and surprisingly well made and maintained.

First hint of the skulking shape of the Strone looming into view.

…and there it is – the Strone has a reasonable claim to be the most impressive, overhanging piece of rock in Britain: 200m high and overhanging by around 50m.

The pair of Golden Eagles in residence graced our arrival with a fly-past (I’d checked with the wardens at the North Harris Eagle Observatory and they were very relaxed about us climbing on the Strone anytime after June, when the Eagles would have fledged any offspring).

After a couple of hours steady plod and we were setting up camp beneath the glowering countenance.

Enough prevarication – we’d need to get cracking if we were going to make the most of the weather.

Here’s a rough topo. The approach direct to the foot of the route is a bit of a pain (as we found out) so you are best to outflank the worst of the boulders to the right, joining the foot of the crag about 100m right of the route and then following a deer track which skirts the base of the face. It’s also worth roping up for the approach pitch (and leaving a fixed rope) – easy climbing (maybe Severe) but crumbly and seeping in places, and no place to be soling in approach shoes with a 20kg rucksack on your back!

That tent looks tiny from up here…

Chilly, with the face still in shade (the lower portion barely caught the sun before it went behind the hill opposite – probably a different prospect on a late evening in June, must be gorgeous!) Somewhat daunting just pulling on!

As if to see us off on our voyage, the pair of eagles chose that moment to put on a fly-past. Magnificent!

There are only a handful (four I think?) of recorded ascents or even attempts of the aid route on the UKC logbooks (there are a few more who have managed the free version, which splits off at half height and climbs some equally outrageous territory!) and the most recent was 2007, but happily our good friend Callum had made a successful ascent at the end of May and provided some updated beta (see Bibliography at the foot of the post). His advice was to ‘French free’ the first three pitches at about E4, but that’s easier said when you’ve got a dozen E8s under your belt. Nonetheless, good advice to use rock shoes and chalk.

The line isn’t really that obvious to start with – you actually traverse hard right for about 5m in the shot above, under the overlap to a rotting hidden corner crack. A few crumbling holds early on gave me the heebie jeebies, but I pressed on and got a couple of bits of gear that you could actually hang your hat on. It soon became apparent that almost none of the fixed gear had been renewed since the 1969 ascent, and that a wet and wild north-facing Scottish crag isn’t kind to mild steel. Only around a third of the rusting relics I encountered in the next 200m were even worth clipping, and I didn’t rate any of them much above body weight. This is no place for falling off (or being heavy)!

There’s talk of a ‘bolt’ in the description, but it took me a while to even spot it… It’s more of a navigational beacon, rather than an aid to upwards progress (though of course I slipped a wire over it to help me balance upwards). Inevitably, as soon as I moved above it, gravity intervened and the hanger tinkled down the crag.

This left me standing on a couple of decent footholds, and facing a mantelshelf onto a sloping ledge, with the last gear about 10ft beneath my feet. An ancient RURP (Realised Ultimate Reality Piton) offered the chance to calm my nerves (or at least gave me something to do whilst I collected my thoughts) but no sooner had I threaded my tiniest RP through the eye and put a krab on it, it parted company with the rock. That’s my trip souvenir sorted out – thanks Doug!

Desperate times call for desperate measures, and I arranged a couple of hooks on fragile edges, equalised them, took a deep breath and stood up. Phew – cam in crack and breathe!

Easier climbing led to a diagonal fault line moving rightwards to a collection of junk formerly known as pegs. Callum had advised running this pitch into the next one, as the state of the fixed gear at the belay was shocking. I’d only been on the pitch about 90mins (not slow by C3 standards) but another 90mins would see us well into the dark, so I had no choice but to improvise the best I could from the resources available. The purple tape on the lowest leftmost gear is on the tiniest ‘progression only’ zero cam that Black Diamond used to make. I think they withdrew them from sale. It’s probably the best piece of the five! I fixed the rope, took another deep breath, and rapped VERY SMOOTHLY INDEED…

Back on terra firma, with the top half of the Strone bathed in the glorious evening light.

Beer o’clock and time for tea after a long and busy day (less than 30hrs after leaving Sheffield!) Our favourite Excellent Adventures sustenance: Chip ‘n’ Dip followed by Pot Noodle. Unfortunately we’d been joined by other tiny wee diners who’d also worked up an appetite… Chip ‘n’ Dip through a midge net requires a bit of coordination.

… as does beer!

Fabulous evening…

… but the Strone loomed…

Fistful sleep (not helped by a punctured Thermarest) had me struggling to conjure up a success picture for the following day. 90mins for the first pitch wasn’t too shabby, and we’d have time for five more of the same the next day, but it had been hard. Felt harder than C3 and borderline dangerous… Anyway, alarm set for 6am and a tonne of gear in the route that we’d need to fetch down. Beyond that we’d just have to see how things turned out.

Heavy dew overnight and everything is soaked, but at least the midges have gone. Looking like another cracking day.

I jugged up the fixed rope, thinking low-gravity thoughts and blocking out images of the rusty stumps I was dangling from. The way beyond that didn’t provide a great distraction either…

Bill set off up the trailing lead rope (still through the gear) to clean the pitch…

You can see quite a gap in the pieces!

Pitch 2 heads rightwards from the belay and into a steep blocky corner crack. There’s actually some gear – things are looking up! There’s even time for a CAC photo op, and I manage a smile!

… then time to crack on. The climbing feels easier and my hard-aid muscle-memory is kicking in (hadn’t done scary aid since before Covid).

The pitch flies by in less than an hour and I start to think we might make it after all. As a bonus there’s a lie-down commodious ledge with a slightly better collection of rusting stumps, and quite a view!

Pitch 3 starts up a loose, flaky corner, maybe E2, which peters out at a small roof with a cheesy consistency. Moving leftwards you’re heading into the seepage line and forced to bust out some free moves on wet holds to arrive at a hanging stance where the original aid and free routes diverge. Poor pegs can be adequately backed up.

Here’s Bill approaching the P3 stance and you start to get a sense of the steepness.

The free route fires off leftwards at this point, up the “flying groove” and it only takes one glance up the original line to realise why. Above lies a sopping wet corner leading to a pair of stepped roofs. The wall left of the corner is coated with a thick black gloop of rotting vegetation, from out of which the occasional lump of redder gloop hints at the demise of a long-gone peg. There’s the  occasional cam and wire placement to get you up near the first roof, at which point I deployed a stick to clip a piece of situ gear at the far side of the roof. This turned out to be a bomber wire (the only bit of fixed gear on the whole route I’d trust with more than bodyweight). Phew – that avoided getting too bogged down in the grunge. The second roof was more of the same from the black gloop perspective, but with enough placements for progress, leading to a big reach to place a decent wire on the edge of the overlap.

Backed up with an equalised cam, you can now lower off to the comfort of the “sofa” stance (and a further junction with the free route). Here’s the view from the sofa…

… and Bill lowering in to put his feet up.

It’s 2pm with only two pitches to go, and I’m starting to feel optimistic. Not getting carried away though, as pitch 5 is the crux. We’d made a tactical decision to bring a pair of 80m ropes, thinking that in an emergency we could maybe tie them together to escape from around this point if needed. Looking down at how quickly the ground falls away we had our doubts, but hopefully we wouldn’t need to put it to the test.

Things get REALLY STEEP here and the fixed gear runs out. The roof above is formed by a fridge-sized block that looms disconcertingly over the stance, and I managed to place a “bombproof” RP2 in a thin crack at it’s base.

Here’s the view down to Bill, chil-laxing on the sofa.

Above me there’s the telltale sign of what was once a bolt from which the guidebook suggests you lean rightwards to gain a thin incipient crack in a crazily steep wall. Dave Turnbull warned me of its demise, crumbling in the hand of Crag Jones on an ascent around the turn of the century. Callum seemed to have managed some levitation hookery at this point, but in the interests of time (a favourite saying on a Bill and Dom’s Excellent Adventure) I deployed the clip stick again to snag a bit of decaying yellow tat, tied off to yet another rusting stump. More anti-gravity thoughts and I’m established on the overhanging wall with two lobes of a purple Totem (we love Totems!) nestling in a pod. I’m even feeling cocky enough to pose for a photo!

More wafer thin relics, backed up by the odd decent placement, and all of a sudden I’m back in the land of the merely vertical. There’s an ancient bolt, a dodgy peg, and a couple of fat cams, and pitch 5 is in the bag! It’s not even 4 o’clock.

We had been hauling a light(ish) sack with spare gear (hammer and pegs, unused), clothing and water etc. You can see it dangling in the shot below, having been lowered out by Bill from the P4 stance, and you can get a feel for just how steep it is!

If you haven’t tried it, you probably can’t comprehend quite how difficult it is to follow an aid pitch of this steepness, with gravity battling to prevent you from removing the gear that the lead rope is going through. Added to this, Bill was weighed down by an extra 5kg of rope (I’d been unable to take in the slack due to rope drag and we were cursing our decision to use 80s). Suffice to say that Bill had quite a workout!

Meanwhile, the immaculate weather was starting to turn (a bit earlier than predicted) as threatening tentacles of low cloud started to spill over into Ulladale from the adjacent valley. I was reminded of Dave’s tale of an epic benightment on the final pitch when the weather came in. It’s not in the bag yet!

The final pitch starts with some HVSish climbing across and up towards a steep (but not crazy steep!) damp crack, which yields to steady C1/2 aid, and finally there are enough placements to supplement the situ junk and instil a feeling of calm and wellbeing. Good honest toil. Just as well as we’re now in thick cloud…

… and all the exposure of our magnificent eyrie has now vanished.

Topped out before 7pm, we’d spent about 12 hours climbing, including fixing the first pitch the day before. Thick cloud and darkness hampered our walk off, and we exercised good mountain judgement by traversing the full length of the broad summit to easier ground, rather than try to shortcut over a potentially unseen cliff edge. Here’s a rough sketch of our descent:

Not quite as cool or speedy as Callum’s descent

Down by 9pm and tucking into another Pot Noodle, washed down with the obligatory beer. The trepidation and doubt from 24hrs previously replaced by a warm weariness and the sense of a weight lifted off my shoulders. Elation could wait for the morning.

I was going to sleep well, regardless of the flat camping mattress!

Grey and grim the next morning, but not yet raining. Belay jackets and cags cast off briefly for a quick “El Cap” pose for the album, but way too cold for the full traditional shirtless shot!

A couple of hours walk back out…

… and back at the car, just as the heavens opened.

With the ferry not due until 4.20pm we had six hours to kill in the drizzle. Helen and I have developed a Rockaroundtheworld protocol for these occasions and I typed the magic word Microbrewery into the search bar of Google Maps. Result – the LoomShed was only a 2mins drive away, but closed on Mondays. 😦 A cheeky Facebook message and we’re being welcomed by Chris, the owner, chief brewer and barman – “…couldn’t let you leave the island without sampling our beer.”

That’s the afternoon agenda sorted out! More green lights.

No prospect of grabbing a quick route in the Cuillin…

… so it’s foot to the floor for another overnight at Craigallan and then a leisurely tootle home.

96hrs door to door: by some way the shortest episode in Bill and Dom’s Excellent Adventures so far. As we drove home through the rain it was hard to deny the fact that we’d really made the most of the narrowest of weather windows. My usual mantra is “If in doubt, be lucky” but this particular escapade also benefitted from laser-like planning and a willingness to back our judgment. We were also reflecting, as we made the long journey home, that it would have taken about as long to get to the base of El Cap as it did to the foot of the Strone (albeit more expensive and a bigger carbon footprint). Whilst it would be over egging it to compare the two, the Strone is the nearest we’ve got on these islands, and The Scoop packs almost as much adventure into its 200m as say Lurking Fear does into 600m. A worthy objective for Episode 14. And relax…

I’ll leave the last words to Doug Scott, who described the first ascent of The Scoop in Hard Rock: ‘It may not be everybody’s cup of tea, but as an exercise in imagination and ingenuity, as one swings high above the moor and the lake, it is a unique experience in fear and fascination.‘

Here is a bit of a bibliography / further reading if you are keen to find out more about the Scoop and the extraordinary cliff of Sròn Uladail:

Beta and Gear advice from Callum:

We started climbing at 9am and topped out at 8pm. I led everything and Andy wasn’t very used to cleaning steep aid pitches. So with an experienced team I’d think you could go a bit quicker. However if you go full aid on first 3 pitches this would slow you down a bit. 60m rope easily reaches the ground from pitch 2.

Pitch 1) French freed around E3/4 at a guess with pulling on a couple cams. The belay isn’t great and I pushed onto the belay at top of pitch 2. Poor rusty Old bolt stub on this pitch I put a sinch type rivet hanger on it.

Pitch 2) Again I French freed it but its easier than the first pitch. Go right from belay and up a pillar (bit loose) to a corner with 2/3 fixed pins and small wires. Pins are average. (Be poor in valley) Fantastic flat ledge. belay is fixed pins with equalised tat.

Pitch 3) goes up a corner that I freed E1/2 then it gets a bit tricky at a roof where the rock goes soft and crumbly. You could fiddle round trying to aid around left but I just freed around it (5b max.. I had rock shoes and chalk bag) the belay again is hanging and not great (flying groove pitch goes left) so I kept going up pitch 4.

Pitch 4) This is where the aiders stay out. It’s wet slimly and grim. The fixed gear is unusable. I didn’t even try after a couple fell out in may hand and the rest crumbled. Take nut key or the like to clean placements. Its mostly cams from .75 BD down. Go up the big corner and left out under the roof. There’s a fixed pin with tat (poor) I equalised it and lowered down back cleaning the corner, then swung left to awesome ledge. I left the rope in the stuff I lowered off and once Andy cleaned pitch 3&4 I pulled back up to where I had been and continued up pitch 5.

Pitch 5) The hardest. STEEP! Up to a little roof and reach right (pin) up a couple meters and to obvious sky hook move. High step reaching right to place a cam. You’re following the obvious steep crack in the roof, couple fixed pins. (We Left a bit of cord on one of them) I had to place a couple of number 2 brass wires. It’s possible that if a couple of the fixed pegs go you’d have to hammer on this pitch…After the roof you get to some bomber cam/wire placements and belay out right on slab. .75 #1 & #2 BD cam for belay + old bolt.

Pitch 6) out right at about HVS. Up a crack C1 ish and then continue up broken grassy ground VS ish some loose rock but not bad.

Gear: I’d take triple set from BD .75 down. Doubles up to BD #2 (took 1 BD 3.. never placed it…but you probably could..) Offset small aliens were useful (when are they not?) Also we had 2x C3 BD cams 000, 00. 0 up to red…what ever size that is. These I found very very helpful. Double set of wires. brass and brass offsets. Sky hooks (used 2/3 times). I’d take some pins for that last pitch just in case. Knife Blades and maybe 3 beaks and couple RURPS. You could also take a few more if you had time and wanted to improve belays. Lost arrows, angles and knife blades.

A UKC Article trip report from Pete Rhodes of a solo ascent published in 2011 (Impressive piece of mental as well as physical fortitude!) https://www.ukclimbing.com/articles/features/pete_rhodes_-_sron_ulladale_solo_ascent-3419

Here’s a YouTube of Johnny Dawes, Paull Pritchard et al on the first free ascent of The Scoop:

Here’s a YouTube video of a live BBC outside broadcast for The Great Climb of an ascent of what became The Usual Suspects, E9 7a, by Dave McLeod and Tim Emmet:

A real-time account of an ascent by Rich Mayfield and Mark Stevenson during their Hard Rock Challenge (now there’s an impressive effort!) https://www.ukclimbing.com/forums/ukc/hard_rock_challenge_-_the_scoop_strone_ulladale-253505