“Hiking in Ireland is fun,” I thought as I threw the rock into the air and hit it far down the path with the hurley-stick. “Look at the rock, not the stick, and your hand can’t help but follow your eye,” my Irish guide Liam had said, and he was right.
He had already taught our small hiking group how to weave crosses out of rushes at the holy well of the Shrine of St. Brigid at Faughart, where we also placed our body parts from knees to heads into the appropriately shaped stones for healing. Now, we were hiking the same cross-country course as that of the All Ireland Poc Fada (Long Puck), a hurling competition that had just been held at the end of July so the course markings were still highly visible and easy for us to follow. As we hiked, the guide told us the competition is based on the story of the Irish hero Cúchulainn, who, as the boy Setanta, had set out from his home to the King’s court hitting his sliotar (the ball in hurling) before him and running ahead to catch it. Not wanting to risk losing sliotars, we used the stones from the path. We had lunch at the cairn at the top of the course, Carn an Mhadaidh.
After lunch, we picked our way through the bog to the deserted village of Lisnashiggle, a Middle-Ages ringfort, stopped to hear more tales such as that of Queen Maeve and the Brown Bull of Cooley and to gaze at a famous, protected fairy tree, and crawled into an Irish sweathouse. We ended our five-hour hike at Lumpers Pub in Ravensdale before heading back to our guesthouse across from the lough (loch) in Carlingford.
We next headed to Donegal, where we hiked the Bluestack Mountains. At the ruins of an old schoolhouse and old stone cottages, our Irish guide Michael explained how the people who lived there shared the work and how the children took their own pieces of turf for the stove in the school. In olden times the turf was cut by a two-sided spade, backbreaking work, while today it is done by machine, as evidenced by the sausages of turf along the hiking path.
We headed on to climb Slieve League with Europe’s highest and finest sea cliffs towering over the Atlantic. However, as the path narrowed and steepened, the rain poured down, and the wind strengthened to gale force. I was forced several times to halt, dig my hiking poles into the ground and put all my weight on them just to remain standing. Michael insisted we turn back, and he was right as even as the path widened, we had to walk three abreast, with arms linked, to withstand the wind. As we relaxed over an exquisite dinner of local, organic foods in our guesthouse, which is also a working farm, I reassured my co-hikers that long after we would have forgotten any views we might have seen of the cliffs, no matter how magnificent, we will still remember our adventure climbing a mountain in gale-force winds.
From County Donegal we travelled to Strandhill in County Sligo, where our marine archaeologist guide Auriel guided us along the sand dunes to the beach. Along with one of many prehistoric shell middens (Sligo means shelly place), we also saw a jockey racing his horse along the sands with his trainer. Horse racing in Sligo dates back to the 1800s. We then travelled on to County Connemara to visit the restored six-acre Victorian walled garden of Kylemore Abbey.
The highlight of our next hike, around Killary Fjord, which forms the border between County Mayo and Galway, was Roy, the Irish sheepdog. His trainer at the sheep farm put Roy to work herding a group of sheep from the lower stone-walled fields to a higher pen, with a calm voice, a whistle and a series of “come-byes” and “aways.” Roy’s six years of training have paid off handsomely, and we enjoyed using the same commands to keep each other together for the rest of our hiking trip.
At low tide in the afternoon we were able to cross to the largely abandoned Omey Tidal Island, where we saw the recently rediscovered ruins of Teampaill Féichín (Féichín’s Church), a medieval church built on a seventh century Christian settlement. The church had been covered in sand until 1981 and is surrounded by the remains of a semi-sunken village that was wiped out during the Famine.
A final highlight of our hiking trip was Inishmore, one of three islands of the Aran archipelago, reachable from Galway by a 294-passenger ferry, a rocking, rolling and pitching 40-minute journey. As we hiked from the ferry landing to our guesthouse at Kilmurvey, we were sometimes huddled by the hedge in rain, wind and sleet and other times basking in sunshine with our faces turned to the wide blue sky, a few of the almost 5,000 kilometres of stone walls surrounding the small fields of the island, and the breaking waves of the Atlantic Ocean. The next day we hiked to Dún Aonghasa Fort, a Bronze Age stone hillfort, whose inner enclosure forms the top of an almost 90-metre cliff looking over the uninterrupted 3,000-kilometre Atlantic, where the nearest landfall is Newfoundland. The fort also has the most impressive existing example of a chevaux de frise, a barrier of densely set, upright, sharp rock pillars that serve as a stone army to guard the western side of the fort.
As we hiked from the fort along the Atlantic, we marvelled at the glacio-karst landscape of limestone pavements, squares of flat stone called clints, with occasional kamenitza, bowls formed where rain has eaten into the surface of the rock, and the cracks between the clints, called grykes, that support a variety of grasses, mosses, herbs and delicate flowers. I struggle to explain the attraction of the landscape. Is it that the pavement forms a sidewalk apparently ideally designed for walking? But it is also deceptively slippery with jagged bits that are dangerously sharp, as the cuts on my hand prove. No, I believe it’s that this limestone, with its fossil corals formed as sediments in a tropical sea 350 million years ago and later scoured by the ice age that ended 15,000 years ago, together with its present new growth of plants struggling between the fissures, reminds us all of the permanence and vulnerability of our planet.
My guided hiking trip was with Joyce’s Ireland, and all but me were return guests, a testimony to this woman-led company. Do visit Ireland. Go on the Internet and consult your travel agent to find the best trip for you.
