{"id":201,"date":"2014-03-22T09:18:15","date_gmt":"2014-03-22T09:18:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cartrongarrow.com\/?p=201"},"modified":"2014-04-25T18:51:34","modified_gmt":"2014-04-25T18:51:34","slug":"canal-walk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/cartrongarrow.com\/?p=201","title":{"rendered":"Canal Walk – Part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

Abbeyshrule to Emper<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/span><\/p>\n

I’ll break this into a few posts as the entire walk covered about 30km, took 6 hours and I took 120 photographs. \u00a0The 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\"DSCN0221\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\"DSCN0233\"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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\"DSCN0236\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading Canal Walk – Part 1<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2,4],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paARl1-3f","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/cartrongarrow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/cartrongarrow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/cartrongarrow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cartrongarrow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cartrongarrow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=201"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/cartrongarrow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":381,"href":"http:\/\/cartrongarrow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201\/revisions\/381"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/cartrongarrow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cartrongarrow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cartrongarrow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}