The last walk of my long weekend was a planned 15 km trip with my son along the canal. We had a fantastic day for it with the sun shining from early in the morning. We got ourselves on the trail by 10:30 on a quiet morning in Ballynacarrigy.

I spotted this interesting thing flowering. I have no idea what it is but it looked quite pretty.

They have been doing more work on resurfacing the trail along this section and it looks almost completed. There was a man attacking some sort of road machine with an unfeasibly large spanner at one point on the trail.

Luckily enough, the new surface runs out around Emper before we got to the really remote bog section. I really hope they leave that part alone as it is such a wild place but I don’t think that is likely.

The incredibly odd bog bridge looms int he distance on this shot. At this point we were about a kilometre from it. We had one of the dogs with us and I decided that as we were some distance from a road, it was safe to let her off the lead. She took full advantage and ran about like some sort of lunatic for this section of the walk.

We took a breather at Bog bridge and we shared a bit of chocolate while I had some coffee. We still had Lily the dog running around and she entirely vanished at this point. We were about to look for here when she returned after having had a nice swim in a bog-hole somewhere.

So we packed ourselves up and left bog bridge behind us.

We headed on to Abbeyshrule where we stopped for another couple of minutes. Abbeyshrule was strangely empty of boats for some reason.

We headed on to the lock beyond Abbeyshrule where we had a quick lunch of tuna rolls and crisps. At this point we were down to about for kilometres left.

We quickly passed Allard’s, Guy’s and Molly Ward’s bridge to arrive at Fowlard’s bridge after about 4 hours total. It was a good weekend’s walking as I managed a total of almost 85 km over the five day break

427 km