Ballyteige

Robert Frost made his visit in November of 1960, just a week after the general election.

A 30 km walk (without a break) on another section of the Wicklow Way; 15 km each way from the head of the Ow River to Mangans, the car parked in the same spot as the last walk. I have to say it was boring. Very boring. It started with a climb through beech and the occasional azalea in Ballyteige Lodge and then along roads into Coilte plantations of larch and spruce. After that first hour, most of the walk was on sealed blacktop; hard on the eyes and feet, both. There was some respite in the form of the odd pretty glade, some soft views across green fields of sheep with lambs, often framed in yellow blooming gorse. It was not raining; a small mercy. I seem to have climbed 860 m which could explain why it took me thirty minutes more than the five hours I had expected. And I walked the last 30 minutes without GPS - not sure why it was lost again; seems to happen when the iPhone roams to the Vodafone network.

By far the most interesting thing was the diversity of mountain and townland names; Ballinagappege Mountain, Carrigamuck, Knockanooker, Knocknashamroge, Corndog, Ballycumber and Coolafunshoge, where I turned back, just short of Tinahely.

I saw only eleven other walkers, two runners and two cyclists in the whole walk. Proof that it was too boring to waste a public holiday unless of course, you were going from one interesting section to another.

And on closing, another opening: it was in The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale that Samuel and Mary Kent slept through the first line.

Forge

The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.

Forge in mock HDR

The sun rose for the 20,447th time and as ever, I missed it. I took a lift to Aughrim in Wicklow and went for a ten kilometre walk. The red-doored town forge enhanced the granite grey, under a grey-skied drizzle in the thin fog of cloud that keeps the Ow and Derry rivers watered. The tree- felled river banks, the logs haphazardly scattered among the water logged wheel furrows, resembled a  narrow margin of abused countryside. The smell of burning wood lingered in the windless valley, the chimney smoke thickening the grey air.

It was cold and I walked up through a Coilte plantation, into the cloud at 150 m and the world disappeared.