we started our morning at the charming Riversdale House B&B, happy that there would be no driving at all today. instead, we’d be doing a lot of hiking. the weather looked a little gloomy, but that was OK. kevin had healthy oatmeal…
but i opted for a big fry-up including delicious sausage and black pudding. i’m glad i had such a big meal, because it was a long day of hiking.
we crossed over the big rocks across the stream and headed down the lovely little road towards glendalough. Once again we passed this stone, and i tried to get a decent photo of it.
kevin decided to walk all the way over and find out what it was. i figured that this would be a long hike and i didn’t want to waste my energy. what was it? maybe kevin will let us know, since i can’t remember.
it would be great to take this lovely walk into town all the time. btw, this morning we started our hike at the crack of…eleven-ish.
we stopped at the visitor center, but i really don’t think we even went inside. we passed all the St. Kevin’s stuff, and were a little surprised to see many tour busses parked in the parking lot, and the place was crawling with people. this made us happy that we’d had such a peaceful and quiet look around the night before.
we got a map and figured out the route we’d like to take – i think it might have been a 9k distance. there were throngs of people at first, all kind of people in all kinds of foot gear, including women in shoes that were totally inappropriate for walking. we weren’t too pleased that the crowd was so think, but as we walked higher, the crowd thinned.
after about an hour we got to the 600 steps. they’re made of railroad planks, and they were covered with a thick mesh so we wouldn’t slip. that’s a whole lotta steps.
there weren’t so many people at this point, but there were still others, and of course we were totally spoiled from walking on the almost-deserted pembrokeshire coast path. and most of these hikers were groups, and many were from other countries. i think these people up ahead were german.
somehow i did manage to get a shot of the empty path, but it was mostly not empty at all. but it was really beautiful and quiet.
we reached this magnificent spot at about an hour and a half into the walk, and thought this was the top.
i think a french guy took this picture of us.
we walked across more planks, and a very fine rain started to fall. they call it a “soft” rain, and it’s unique – you can see it coming down, but if you hold out your hand, you can’t feel it because it’s so delicate.
the only problem with the narrow planks is that we kept encountering people coming the other way, and somebody had to step down into the bog on either sog, and it was a very boggy bog.
after another half hour we reached the real peak, and it was quite something.
a perfect photo op! ta da!
we could see the path way way down below us and i marveled at the fact that i’d managed to make it up so far. but boy, that looked like a long way down…
more soon.
ok then,
mrs. wednesday hughes.