Spink

I'm going to die.

Confuse the colour blind

Which is what the MiniMan said while we did an 8 km walk up the Spink. The Spink is the well known mountain in Glendlough that overlooks the Upper Lake, where we first wandered to watch mallard. Our real attempt at the Spink started from the Information Centre, where we saw foxes, mink and a host of other stuffed animals illustrative of local fauna. We were already about 100 m above mean sea level and followed the red trail up past Pollanass Waterfall. The walk is not hard but the very steep steps are tiring. Old railway sleepers, laid end on end like overlapping dominoes - we decided that Domino Spink was the name of an arch criminal, punishing us cruelly.

We reached the Spink and carried on along the white trail to the 4 km point, where we had a picnic at the highest point, about 500 m amsl according to WalkMeter. The haze restricted the views but the lake was very pretty. We could see to the reservoir at Turlough Hill but not much more than that. Our binoculars were worth the carry when we watched some deer grazing on the other side of the valley and my companion even saw a fox go into a hole, presumably its den. A raven was quartering the area, gliding in the light airs and seemed to be keeping a careful eye on our fruit.

No Walking on Water

We talked about Red Hugh O'Donnell from Donegal and Art and Harry O'Neill from Ulster who escaped from Dublin Castle in January 1593, the only people ever to do so. We were looking down on the place where it is said that Art died of exposure and Red Hugh got frostbite that took his big toes. 

We finished after three hours with a well deserved 99, the ice cream cone and chocolate flake embellished with both lime and raspberry ripples.

Today's opening line comes from a Scandanavian crime novel that was written in 2002, translated in 2009 and published in English in 2009. And back in the February post called Aftershock, it was Margaret Foster who was trying to understand in her novel Over.