It was a rare day of stifling heat, the sun so bright the midge were lurking only in the shadiest nooks and rankest heather. The dog thought she was in for a long walk and began to get agitated when we stopped at the Coffin Stone. Three youths were assembled on the first pitch of The Pause, finding wet slicks to complain about.

The first two pitches of Spartan Slab angle up rightwards by means of generous cracks providing pleasant moves, rarely severe, till just below the crevasse on Pause.

Holly, the dog, whimpered on the Coffin Stone having failed on the second pitch. The idea that she was in for a long hot wait was beginning to register in her canine consciousness.

For the uninitiated, like Holly, climbing on granite slabs, though rarely strenuous, can be perplexing for want of anything resembling conventional hand or footholds. It often requires confident whole body manoeuvres of a dynamic nature to maintain equilibrium or defy gravity.

The first challenge of the route is to negotiate a convenient cleavage in the roof which arches across the massive apron of slabs. It may be possible to surmount this obstacle with style but traditionally it involves an arm jam at full stretch followed by a western roll on to the slab above.

The necessity for a photographic record occasioned the leader to carry a small camera in his breast pocket which made this move unnecessarily painful so he ran it down the rope for the second to deal with. Meanwhile the leader on Pause was padding past the crucial incipient crack onto something very blank. We remembered doing the same ourselves and briefly considered saying something before deciding it would be presumptuous at this stage.

Holly had ceased her whimpering and was looking down the track, tail wagging in excited anticipation as some lads approached the Coffin Stone. As their heads appeared, she started her frantic barking routine.

“Just give her a biscuit, you'll get them in the top of the blue sack”, her master shouted down to the apprehensive young tigers. The lads obliged and within seconds the big soft creature was all over them. “Some guard dog you are”, they laughed.

When the second arrived at the overlap, he found the same problem with the camera, which was hanging round his neck. Now being a Yorkshire man he doesn't suffer fools or inefficiency gladly so in a colourfully expressed pique of irritation, he flung the offending object over his shoulder. The carrying strap was obviously not designed for such treatment and the device continued in a surreal parabola to land in a thicket a hundred feet below. This incident occasioned a blast of choice Aberdonian invective, the like of which is rarely heard on the crags these days. The youths below covered their ears and looked away in embarrassed silence.

The next pitch gives the best climbing on the route. It goes by a pair of cracks, past the stubs of some old pegs, to pull rightwards through a roof on "holds" which at any other angle, on any other rock might not feel so comforting.

The leader on Pause had now been paused in a hopeless situation for some time and was consulting with his second as to the route description. The time had come to put him out of his misery.

"It's the wee groove you passed back there."

"Are you sure? It looks thin, "

"Not as thin as where you are heading,"

"Oh **** how do I get back there,"

"That's why it's called Pause,"

We watched apprehensively as he began gingerly retracing moves he thought he would never have to reverse.

The last pitch on the slabs seemed cleaner and better than we remembered and led to an area of small roofs, chimneys and rank heather ledges.... a veritable ordeal by midge if you stopped moving for a second. A sense of urgency verging on panic occasioned a hasty and undignified scrabble across the top of the walls and down the disintegrating path.

Back at the Coffin Stone Holly was delighted to be reunited with her master.The owner of an ex-camera was less than delighted with the useless rattling object he retrieved by an abseil through a midge infested thicket.

"We'll just have to do it again to get the photos."

Fortunately, Spartan Slab has a quality which withstands repeated ascents and should always provide a pleasant day out and a touchline view of action on the Trilleachan slabs.