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Photos: Big G


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This month Big G stumbles across what others might deem ‘just another roadside attraction’. More fool them…this shit is gold! This shit is The Stone Bubble of Betws. This shit rocks maaannn!!!!!

Dear NWB readers,
Just when one thought bouldering couldn’t get odder - there comes even greater oddity, wrought from the very bed-rock!

Yes; sensing the possibility of some queer anomaly in the depths of the rock where the A470 strikes west from Betw-y-Coed, engineers hacked and burrowed for many hundreds of hours in an effort to free the unique subterranean scoop; prisoner to the eons.
The resultant rock scar is immense, so bad in fact that it had to be masked by feigning a road improvement scheme. (gr 797 546)

The water-polished scoop challenges everything one has ever taken for granted in our many-splendored sport.

It is not a boulder, it hasn’t a bottom or a top, and it has no holds. The feasible moves may only be mere pulls into a ‘feet-off-the-ground’ scenario; persons then slipping backwards into the delightful young willows that adorn the base of the feature.

In wet weather the scoop becomes ...wet and is not worth a visit. But in dry conditions it is bound to receive heavy traffic once its status is established.

The setting is quite magical with the great trees of the upper Conway spraying the place with a dot-mantle of autumnal colour just now, the calm surfaces of the adjacent river; a leaf-mosaic of pure joy.

Oh-and the scoop- it could not be more roadside if it were a crash-barrier!

Sloper, sloper burning bright...

Love, Big G

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