Abbeyshrule to Emper

I’m not counting this as one of my days but I’ll post on it here anyway. As I’ve been having a pretty rough week and was pretty seriously stressed, I decided I needed a big walk to clear my head. So as I’ve been toying with the idea of doing the Royal Canal way for the last while, I decided that it was a good time to get started on it. So, I took a day off work and got a few snacks and got myself ready to go.

I’ll break this into a few posts as the entire walk covered about 30km, took 6 hours and I took 120 photographs.  The plan was to walk the section from the Whitworth aqueduct in Abbeyshrule to Mullingar. I toyed with the idea of bringing one of the dogs, but as I didn’t really know what to expect, I gave that idea a miss. It turned out that I probably could have managed to bring the younger of our two dogs. Poor old Sally probably wouldn’t have been up to 30k since she generally has a few hours’ kip after the 5k local loop.

Anyway, it was an overcast but reasonable morning when I got dropped off at the aquaduct. There was some messing going on where some muppet with a truckload of avgas for the local airfield had tried to go across the aquaduct but thought the better of it and was reversing out but once he sorted himself out, I was on my way.

The aquaduct carries the canal over the River Inny and makes getting in and out of the village of Abbeyshrule impossible without crossing water – or at least it makes it very confusing. Just after that I met a woman who was walking her dog who was the last person I would see for some time.

I’d walked a couple of kilometres up from Abbeyshrule, to the point of this very odd bridge which is in the middle of nowhere, has the remains of a road going up to one side and nothing at all on the other side. Perhaps there was a great house there at some point.

The next few kilometres were pretty featureless with only the occasional bridge to break up the view. But I quickly realised that it was an amazing perspective on the countryside as I was in utter solitude. Where I normally walk and in pretty much all of the midlands, humans generally intrude upon the soundscape in that there is always the distant rumble of traffic or somebody running a chainsaw. But out in the middle of this stretch of canal there was no human sound aside from one or two overflying airliners at cruise altitude. So I pressed on for an good hour or so in glorious solitude with only the sound of the wind and the birds.

So for the rest of this section of walk, there was a lot of views like this. For my first 5km or so, the ground was dead flat until I came across my first lock at Emper. I’ll stop this post at this point as it is getting a bit long.