Kippure

The August heat was slipping away with the day.

Another crime novel opening. And we can close the heat felt by the Parisians in the opening line of Suite Francaise by Irène Némirovsky, from the Skyline post in Februrary.

MiniMan checks the compass

Which is not to say the walk up Kippure was on a hot day - it was warm, the gauge in the car registered 23 C. The absolute highlight was the group of a dozen Sika deer that appeared as we crossed a stream. They lay, sat and stood and watched us for about twenty minutes before I got greedy for a closer photo. We watched two head butting and could hear the rattle of their horns though it seemed to be amicable sparring rather than any aggressive dominant male thing.

If the deer were a highlight, the dumped computers and other appliances on the edge of the Wicklow Mountains National Park was a disgraceful nadir. I thought we'd tidied this up and moved on.

At the summit, we crossed the county border between Dublin and Wicklow several times. We admired the hazy view as we snacked on BLT sandwiches (which is when I learned that MiniMan would not eat lettuce or tomato). The huge communications antenna fingered the sky above us, tethered by some serious cables, all of which is the ugly side of being in a wilderness that is only 15 minutes from a city of one million people.

We covered 10 km in about 5 hours, an ascent of 350 m. The deer reappeared on the descent as did some snipe, several we heard creeching on a skylark sound stage, one we saw zigging and zagging away from us.