I came across some info about the Siabh An Iarainn walking festival up in Drumshanbo and I figured this would be a good opportunity to get up Sliabh Aniarainn.  So I got myself to Drumshanbo and joined the group for a quick bus trip to the starting point. We were a rather large group of 38 as two walks had been combined but everyone seemed reasonably well organised.

We joined a rough trackway up the western side of the mountain and quick soon we had spectacular views over Lough Allen.

It quite quickly became apparent that we were a group of fairly mixed abilities as the pace was quite relaxed and we had a couple of stops almost immediately. Still, it was a novelty to be walking in a group and it was nice to not to have to bother with navigation.

Our organisers had been busy before the walk and had added a few new stiles along the route. This man was very proud of his handiwork. Not sure if has photographing the group or his stile.

As we ascended we came across flecks of snow and the mountain itself was covered in snow. The temperature dropped markedly and as we were going relatively slow, my jacket and gloves came out of my bag in short order.

We took a coffee break after a couple of hours in a nice sheltered spot. After the initial climb, the going got a lot easier and we began to make some vaguely reasonable progress. The snow made for some quite specular photographs when combined with the clearing skies.

As we crossed the ridge we started looking for somewhere for lunch out of the wind. The views were really quite fantastic at this point.

After lunch, we headed off for the trig point which is on an island in the middle of a bog. We managed to get on to it with relatively little trouble but there wasn’t much of the path left by the time we’d got 38 people past.

After the peak we started heading along the ridge to big to make our descent. We split into two groups after about a kilometre and while I would have loved to continue on the longer walk, I was under time pressure and so bugged out for the quicker return. On the way down we passed a rather isolated mass rock.

This is was in a massive crack in a sheer rock face.

After this, it was a relatively short scramble down and across a very rickety bridge and we were on a track that used to be a road down the mountain. The bus picked us up at the bottom of this and it was back to the hotel for some soup and sandwiches.

It was a good relaxed day’s walking with some fantastic views and it was a nice stress-free way to get up Sliabh Aniarainn with somebody else doing the navigation.

436.5 km