The Galloway Hills offer demanding terrain for the hillwalker and Galloway's coastline offers a wealth of climbing - mostly at intermediate grades - for the rock climber, but there are relatively few inland climbing crags and those there are are mostly single pitch. This has meant that the team's training programme has never focussed much on the more technical aspects of crag rescue techniques. Recently however there has been a flurry of activity in the area with many new routes being put up on the remote crags at the Dungeon and Mulwarchar, as well as at a newly developed crag at Corwar, which is more easily accessible. The new Scottish Lowlands guidebook incorporates these developments along with a lot of new routes on the Mull of Galloway and as a result of this we are expecting more climbers to be coming to Galloway, with the possibility of new demands on the Mountain Rescue Team.

It was felt that our training should be developed so that we could cover these situations and a course was set up last November called 'Rigging for Rescue'. Our trainer was Richard Terrell from the Brecon Beacons MR team. Richard has been trained in the use of a new system for crag rescue which was developed in Canada and is now widely in use throughout North America. He is now passing on his knowledge and experience to other teams.

The system is built around a number of dedicated pieces of new hardware and adopts a rigorous attitude to safety. One of the potential problems of rescue equipment lies in its overlap with personal climbing gear. The breaking strengths of most climbing equipment is designed to cope with a single falling climber, whereas in a crag rescue there may be two climbers, a stretcher and a casualty on the same system. It is therefore important to work out the force on a rescue system to ensure that it is always within a safe working load. The techniques we learnt were designed to pass a 'whistle stop test', in other words if a whistle was blown at any time during the rescue operation, every member of the team should be able to let go of whatever part of the system they were operating and both they and the casualty would still be safe.

Various techniques were explored but the heart of the system was a '540' belay device which could be used in both the lowering and raising of a load. Static rather than dynamic ropes were used at all times since (unlike in sport climbing) there should never be any slack in the system. All anchor ropes were fed to a dedicated rigging plate and the stretcher lower was controlled by a solid and reliable rescue rack, while the 540 and a system of double prusiks was incorporated into a safety rope.

Training took place at Clifton rocks on the Saturday and at Corwar on the Sunday and all members of the team who attended were enthusiastic about the system. We are currently in the process of acquiring the new bits of hardware and planning for regular training in their use.