With the long evenings in, I am finally able to get evening walks in and for the next few months, I’ll try to get an evening walk in with the children as well as walking in the day.
So, today I made it round both at lunchtime and in the evening – once on the longer loop and once on the shorter one. The children were suitably impressed by the riot of yellow we’re getting from the gorse.
The smell of gorse has also really started spreading which is one of those real aromas of late spring / early summer.
I went out for a walk after work as the fine weather is still continuing and it was a lovely evening. It wasn’t far from dusk by the time I got going but there was plenty of time for a decent walk.
Not an awful lot else to report. There is still new stuff flowering pretty much every day.
I had another quick lunchtime outing today with the fine weather still continuing.
There wasn’t a lot new to report as we were powering around on the shorter loop so as to fit the walk into my lunch hour. It looks like the Devil’s matchstick is getting ready to spore.
It was just me and the dogs and we took the shorter loop.
This afternoon’s walk was a rather convoluted loop around Mote Park forest in Co. Roscommon. This is an amenity area with loads of forest walks and is pretty well setup with a distinct lack of mud. The route was to take me to the top of this hill. It is an old demesne.
After leaving the road, the surfaces were for the most part well made hard gravel paths.
There were loads of people about enjoying the spring sunshine and in places there was a love carpet of spring flowers. It appears to be a good spot for bluebells but it’s still a few weeks too early for that.
Further along I spotted this Herb Robert flower making an early appearance.
There were fine views from the top – as is usual for midland hills you can see for 10s of miles in the distance. The power station at Lanesborough was clearly visible in the distant haze.
You could see the huge expanse of bog to the north and to the east which stretches almost the whole way from Strokestown to Killashee in Longford, punctuated by the mightly Lough Ree of course.
The forest track emerged onto a minor road at the top and I decided to follow a trail marker sign which sent me in the direction of the Mausoleum for the family that owned the demesne, the Croftons.
After this interesting visit, I had to backtrack to get back to my starting point, so I didn’t bother with any more photographs as it was just the same thing in reverse although I did take a slightly different route for a bout a kilometre.
I got up early and nipped out for a quick lap while everyone else was still in bed on a Sunday morning. The recent run of fine weather is continuing so it was a lovely morning for it.
Everything is really starting to get going now with the spring flowering season and the place is starting to come alive properly.
It is even starting to dry out nicely and I helped things along a bit by releasing a couple of impromptu dams that were blocking up some the drains.
As the fine weather continued into the afternoon we decided to go and look for another geocache in Newcastle woods.
We started along the Inny walk from the carpark and quickly passed Newcastle house which is on the opposite side of the river Inny.
We decided to leave the finding of the geocache until the end of the walk and we ended up going quite a long way for Newcastle wood.
We completed a figure 8 walk and then headed back up to look for the geocache but unfortunately failed to find it as we were supposed to be looking under a mossy rock in sea of mossy rocks. We’ll have to try again another time.
It was a lovely morning for a walk so I nipped out quickly to do a loop after breakfast and before the business of the day got started. I had both dogs with me but aside from them I was on my own.
I made reasonable progress over the first kilometre but started messing about with taking pictures after that as it was such a sunny morning.
It really was a fabulous morning and it makes such a difference for it to be so sunny even if it wasn’t that warm thanks to a fairly stiff northeasterly breeze.
A bit futher round, in a more shaded part of the forest, the woodsorrel has just started flowering.
As it was a fine evening, I decided to go out for a few kilometres on the canal to try to find a geocache with the children. We set out from Abbeyshrule village to give ourselves a reasonable length of walk as the cache was supposed to be up around Bog Bridge.
We had a fairly uneventful walk along the canal aside from a bit of a stop for the children to pet a pony. The blackthorn is starting to flower in places so we’ll have a riot of white hedges for the next couple of weeks.
We managed to keep up quite a pace, probably due to the exciting nature of our mission. Once you get a couple of kilometres out of Abbeyshrule you are in proper bogland.
We got to Bog Bridge and according to my phone still had a few hundred metres to go. This is a particularly remote area due to the bogland. We found the location thanks to the good description on the geocaching website.
We wrote up the notebook and took a couple of pictures before setting off back. It was a fair distance out of Abbeyshrule so we managed 7.5 km
Got out for a fairly normal lunchtime walk today. The place is looking fantastic with gorse blooming everywhere but not a lot else is particularly active at the moment. The trees all seem to be a week or two late.
We made reasonably good time on the walk covering the loop in about 50 minutes.
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
Walking forests and trails in the midlands of Ireland
