Monday, September 20, 1999

For my birthday I asked Art to let me sleep in. I did - until nearly 9! We had another full Irish breakfast, then went into Tralee with Anne and her daughter Marianna to get some money at the Bank of Ireland on our MasterCard. Fortunately, I had no problem, so I feel much better about the missing PIN number.

Once back at The Haven, it was time to pack up and start our walk. I thought about how many days I'd walked in Brier to prepare myself for this. It was like setting out on a long-awaited adventure. I must admit I felt a little like a fraud as I loaded up my daypack with a change of clothes, water, lunch, assorted first-aid stuff like bandaids and moleskin, aspirin and the remnants of my cold medication, and Kleenex. And when we stepped off the property at The Haven and adjusted our walking sticks, I wondered if people somewhere around were chuckling at our gear. It was just a walk, after all!

We headed up the paved road we'd been on the day before on our "warmup" walk. When we came to the gate and the signpost marking the Dingle Way, we passed a couple resting on a rock. They had backpacks much larger than ours - looked like they were carrying everything, including a tent. The woman was reading aloud to the man. We exchanged hellos and passed them.

The "Dingle Way Companion", a book we bought after two days on the trail, says this about the Dingle Way:

A group of intrepid outdoor sloggers coalesced in the early 1980's and planned a clockwise track around the Dingle Peninsula using green roads, minor roads, butter roads, tracks, paths, botharins and old railway lines to link the loop. They trudged tirelessly from house to house to clear the right for public walking, to seek permission, to reassure, to pacify and in some cases prevent a reopening of another civil war. Discussions with landowners and farmers were handled with great respect, dexterity, psychology and trust. Eventually, and not without its share of hiccups - some evident in the route's deviations - the Dingle Way was crocheted together.

For the next four or five miles we walked along the moorland flanks of the Slieve Mish mountains. The path was full of rocks and ice-strewn boulders. In some places it was barely recognizable as a path. All along the way sheep were grazing, each with the unique marking of its owner spray painted on its wool. As we came up to them, they looked at us with sheeplike expressions and then moved out of our way. They didn't appear to have much interest in, or fear of, us, but they always moved away. It was kind of a relief, actually. I didn't have any interest in challenging a sheep for a place on the trail. We stopped frequently to turn to face downhill. The view of Tralee and then, later, the rural area by the bay, was beautiful.

It was a long four or five miles, taking about three hours. We met only one other couple coming the other way, and stopped to chat about the virtues of walking sticks. We made fairly slow progress because of the rocky terrain and my caution in navigating it. I didn't want to sprain an ankle or a knee. Art got into the habit of walking somewhat ahead of me, then resting until I caught up with him. His natural pace is faster than mine, and not staying right with me made my slow pace easier for him to tolerate, I think. In spite of our best efforts to stay upright, Art fell at least once, and I fell at least twice.

Along the way we saw many stone ruins on the hillsides. They looked like little old forts staggered all over the hills, almost to the top. We stopped for lunch at one alongside the path. It was hard to tell whether they'd been lived in 50 years ago, or 500. We saw a lot of these structures during the week, and we learned that they're ringforts, a fairly common structure used for shelter over the last thousand years or so.

We crossed three small rivers in this section of the walk, all of them by footbridge. I believe I've overcome some of my fear of falling because I managed to traverse them all. I think the walking stick, used as a balance or third leg, was helpful.

Eventually the rocky stretch ended and we were on a lower path. It was quite muddy - it had rained the night before and there had been animals through it earlier in the day. I learned quickly how to use my walking stick to gauge the depth of the mud or the stability of the small rocks. I knew that my shoes were not waterproof - I'd not been able to find Gore-Tex boots that didn't hurt my feet - so I made a real effort to keep my shoes dry. After a while I gave up and established a new goal of not getting my feet wet inside my shoes. That was easier to do, since I had on heavy hiking socks over liners.

We came to Killelton, the ruins of an old settlement shrouded in trees. Nearby there is a 7th or 8th century rectangular stone oratory, where we stopped to take pictures. Continuing on the muddy trail, Art got increasingly annoyed with the evidence of animals having been by - horses, we thought. It was pretty thrashed in places. In this section we nearly got lost several times because the instructions given us weren't clear enough to easily tell where we were supposed to be going. There were ripe blackberries along the way, though, which eased our frustration somewhat. We commented that the blackberries weren't as big and sweet as the ones at home. By the end of the walk, though, they tasted pretty darn good!

The last part of the day's walk included large stepping stones across the Finglas River. There's a myth about this river:

This river drains the basin of Cathair Con Ri, the promontory fort and mountain seat of Cu Ri Mac Dara who outwitted Cuchulainn in the love triangle for the hand of Blaithnid. Cuchulainn, a mythological hero of the Red Branch Cycle, traced his loved one to the district and on the appointed signal from Blaithnid - she spilled milk into the Finglas - Cuchulainn attacked the fort and won her back. His joy was short lived, however, as Cu Ri's Druid later avenged his master's misfortune with tragic results all round.

We then turned onto the paved road to head into Camp, our first night's destination. We had walked eight point seven miles. It was 7:30 pm, nearly dusk. When we arrived at Finglas House, our hostess Cathleen said that she was just about to call Anne Costello to see when we'd left, because she was concerned about our lateness. It was a pleasure to see our luggage by the door of the B&B as we sat on the steps and took off our filthy shoes and socks. We were footsore and thirsty. But after installing ourselves in our room (we got a downstairs one), showering and changing clothes, we felt revitalized enough to go for a fatwise splurge on fish and chips at a tiny take-away place two doors down, the only food place open at that time of night. We took the food up to the sitting room, wolfed it down, then headed over to the pub next door, owned by our B&B hostess and her husband.

There had been a sheep showing, held only once a year, in Camp that day before our arrival. Most of the sheepman had gone home to change and then returned to the pub. There was a small Irish music group playing. A man danced with a broom. People sang along with the harmonica player. A slow-witted local danced with a laughing middle-aged woman. Art stood by the musicians. I sat at a plank table and had a good conversation with a visitor from England and one from Wales. Rounds of drinks were bought, by us and by others. Only one person in the entire pub, of about 60 there, was drunk. The last call was at 11. We left before the pub closed at 11:30 and headed for bed.


September 21, 1999

After another Irish breakfast, and a bag load of clean clothes, for which we paid five pounds - we left Camp. We walked back up the road we'd been on the day before and picked up the trail again. The day's walk was great - uphill for the first mile and a half or so. Periodically we turned around and looked back at the road we'd just come up, then over to the left where there was a glorious view of hills and valleys, vivid green and nearly treeless, with an occasional farmhouse. It was a calendar view.

The townland of Cool has hidden ringforts and chambers, many overgrown, but as you rise, the valley under Cathair Conn Ri becomes apparent and the whole district can be imagined as a fertile homeland for a chieftain and clan with ringforst and herds of animals, hunting and fishing with stories round the camp fire at night. Surely this was the place to be.

At the crest of the hill we came upon a broad plateau; we walked across it for three and a half miles. Nothing but us, hundreds of sheep, and peat bogs.

The blanket bog of Slieve...was born of old wetlands, fenlands and woodland that through a combination of poor drainage, the presence of acidic sphagnum, decaying of sedges, grasses, heathers, pines and oaks that together with podzoliation and a moist Atlantic climate triggered the laying down of peat. This peat or turf is harvested annually as fuel for households, each turbary or plot handed down from generation to generation...

During harvesting, the turf is cut into strips about the size of firewood and stacked in the field in a teepee-like arrangement to dry before it is hauled off.

As well as giving heat, food, shelter and colour, turf acts as preservative....During the first half of this century the body of a young girl believed to have been dead for over one hundred years was discovered in reasonable condition beside a ball of wool and a deer comb.

We learned that recently the bogs have been recognized as an ecosystem, and efforts are being made now to preserve them rather than destroying them through harvesting.

There was silence except for our voices and the wind. No cars on this old road at all. Fuschias and blackberry bushes with ripe berries. A dog on a chain near the end of a road, apparently set out during the day to warn sheep against crossing the property line.

Then an incline into a hamlet and onto a bridge spanning a creek, where we ate the rest of yesterday's sandwiches and started in on a pack of Starbursts. Met an English fellow named Derek who'd been behind us, catching up slowly with his more rapid pace. As we talked a car passed by slowly, then stopped. The elderly, nearly toothless driver rolled down his window and we had a chat. Turns out he practiced medicine for many years in a town five miles from where Derek is from. Derek and the driver got into a discussion about the Manchester United soccer team. When Derek said that he was not a Manchester fan, the driver appeared to be horrified - like Derek was a traitor or something. I guess when your region has a world-class soccer team, the option of not being a soccer fan is not really available. We started off again, on a rougher trail now. The wind and temperature were variable - I kept putting on my windbreaker, taking it off and putting on my fleece jacket, then taking it off.

As we crossed a ridge, we were looking down onto Inch Strand, a coastal area by Dingle Bay. We could see farmers using machinery to cut the hay, then gather it into bales and package the bales into heavy black plastic. We'd always seen hay put into barns for storage; we called the Irish storage method "hay in the bag". Throughout our two weeks in Ireland, we saw plastic-covered hay everywhere we went.

The trail dropped down near the ocean at Inch, where Robert Mitchum filmed "Ryan's Daughter" back in the 70s. The sky looked threatening and we watched it carefully, in case we needed to put on rain bottoms or head for a pub in Inch to wait out the storm. But the rain didn't come, so we continued past Inch as the road rose again. Another long gradual uphill climb. As we passed some houses, the old doctor drove by again, on his way home this time. I can't remember the last time I passed someone coming and going in one day.

On the final leg of our walk, before dropping down into an interior valley, we stopped to read in our walking guide about this phase of the trail. It described a stone monolith in a pasture on the right. Art looked around until he found the 12-foot structure. He climbed the fence and traipsed across the field to get a closer look and take some pictures. I waited outside the fence, ever the law-abiding non-risk taker. It was a good opportunity for me to rest my feet. The last mile was on a straight paved downhill road into the town of Annascaul.

Our B&B was the Anchor. We were glad that we'd be staying two nights. We asked our hostess, Marie, for a recommendation for a place to eat dinner, which turned out to be the South Pole Pub across the street and down a block. It was founded and owned by Tom Crean, a local who was on several of Scott's Antarctic expeditions and later returned to Annascaul to live. We met up there with the English couple (Roger and Rosa) we'd seen reading the book as we were leaving Blennerville the day before, and another English couple (Brian and Julie) who've rented a horse caravan for a week and are having hilarious adventures with their reluctant, strong-willed horse (hilarious to everyone but them, that is). We sat with these people for a couple of hours until we got too tired. Roger commented that by the end of their trip they would have gotten so much exercise that they would look like a couple of racing snakes. That was a very descriptive phrase, and we all laughed. None of us bore the slightest resemblance to racing anything!

Today was a great blend - good walking and company, and decent weather.