Outdoor Discoveries

Pairs

Thinking back to a year ago when I was in the middle of a career break, I am struck by how much reading I was doing. There were two from Bruce Chatwin, In Patagonia and Songlines, and both gave me my fill of travelogue writings by the time that I got as far as January. Both contained a certain air of desolation that also came in its own way from Kev Reynold’s Abode of the Gods. It might have been a certain end of year feeling with the dull days of a passing December as much as what I was reading. After all, I found myself again detached from the mainstream flow of living much like I did when transitioning from university into the world of work.

The sense of desolation might have befallen my impressions of Tim Robinson’s Stones of Aran duology but for other distractions. Work has been among these as much as seasonal activities like sending cards and buying presents. Becoming engrossed in computer tinkering has been another factor and it certainly helped with speeding up this website. All of this delayed my completion of the aforementioned pair of books with their incompleteness of ending. The second was supposed to resolve a conundrum posed by the first but I get the impression that it may have proved to be a voyage of acceptance rather than resolution.

For all that, I now have moved onto the same author’s Connemara trilogy and there is extra life in its early pages. A quieter place like Aran has less documented history while most of the action is elsewhere so it is easy to find loose ends that never can be brought to a satisfying conclusion. For one thing, oral history can bring its own challenges with an intermingling of myth and actual events together with loss of memory as one generation hands over to another. Eve today, this remains an elemental place as I found when I was there last August.

Throughout all this recent activity, two visits have been made to the moorland around Hathersage, Grindleford and Sheffield. In fact, there is such an extensive path network that more may follow because of the possibilities that are offered. That thought popped into my mind during last Sunday’s hike from Grindleford into Sheffield during an interlude between spells of heavy rain. In truth, I should have been attending to seasonal matters but my enthusiasm for hill country got the better of me.

Anything that grants views of such sights as Padley Gorge and Higger Torr cannot be a bad thing and the area could be a fallback should all other forms of inspiration fail me. December was not much of a walking month for me in 2017 so I embarked on bus journeys that took me around mid-Wales and by the area that I walked last Sunday in their stead. It helps that collecting ideas is as good as making use of them and those from then led to one walk from Hathersage to Sheffield in November and another from Grindleford to Sheffield last Sunday. In turn, each of the duo could be the cause of return visits to the area and longer hours of daylight could allow more scope for any future explorations.

Journeys of others

Before my career break, I found it difficult time to read a book and often lapsed into watch television documentaries on the BBC iPlayer. The situation got reversed after a book called Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi encouraged the practice. Whenever I feel an emotion that I do not want to remain, a TV watching binge never helped but reading a book causes movement and the feeling can be left in the past. It is as if someone else’s journey brings you along too.

Currently, that is taking on the shores of the Aran Islands in the company of Yorkshireman Tim Robinson. Reading his two part work on the islands has lain on my reading list for far too long and I started Stones of Aran: Pilgrimmage back in the noughties only never to get very far with it. My paper copy may be gone but I made a new start on its digital counterpart and it is reading well so far.

Handily, I visited Inishmore (Árainn, as Gaeilge) so the localities are not all that lost to me. If another visit were to happen, then Iaráirne could see an encounter as could the opposite end of the island if I feel sufficiently adventurous. Sightings of Inishmann (inis Meáin, as Gaeilge) or the Brannock Islands could be additional rewards for such endeavours. Before such things, more of Robinson’s works like Stones of Aran: Labyrinth and his Connemara Trilogy await and who knows what they might inspire?

The world described by Tim Robinson is not dissimilar in ambience to that described in Chris Townsend’s The Munros and Tops, another of this year’s reads. After that came John McPhee’s Coming into the Country and it proved to be a book in three very different sections. The first section features the Brooks Range with a narrative split in two with the second part preceding the first. It still hangs together well with the second and third sections featuring more of the folk that are attracted to the idea of a wild place away from the strictures of everyday living.

That unleashes tensions when trying to find a new state capital or dealing with the encroaching bureaucracy keen on keep a wild landscape as it is when you fancy exploiting its resources on a small scale. The act of taking a Caterpillar D9 bulldozer into wilderness oddly aroused my concern for the machine and not the landscape as might be expected. Maybe it reminded me of of abandonment in a big hostile world and there could be a wider theme there. In the end, McPhee finds himself siding with industrious Alaskans earning a living rather than others solely following their perhaps unrealisable dreams. They might fancy abandonment much like Christopher McCandless only to find that they still need humanity or that it continues to intrude on their world.

Stepping away from humanity awhile is a recurring theme in my own wanderings and it is why such places as the Scottish highlands and islands are as amenable to my ends as the wilder parts of other places. That also explains a certain interest in North America that was accompanied by perusal of writings about Lewis and Clark crossing the continent though that was a very dry read that I was happy to finish.

There is another recurring theme in all of this: you often find Robert Macfarlane appearing in these with either a recommendation or a foreword. That applies to the McPhee and Robinson works as much as that by Nan Shepherd on the Cairngorms. It might be that he is using his fame to restore older books to our notice but I reckon that I might be reading them anyway given how I have been collecting them onto a reading list in recent months.

Speaking of those older books, it is unlikely but if I ever were to wnat more but I might be tempted by the Gutenberg project if I wanted eReader files of works from a very different era by Heny David Thoreau or Raplh Waldo Emerson. They are out of copyright but a visit to either AbeBooks, The Literature Network or Scribd could serve a use if I fancied a wider selection of those still covered by such restrictions. With more new tomes that appeal to me, that is unlikely to happen just yet. Usefully, the time taken to complete any single volume should put a brake on any overspending. After all, it is better to acquire for reading than to decorate a bookshelf and horde more than you need.

Sharing or sparing?

Having what is called a bucket list, a list of places that you would like to visit while you can, is common these days but I wonder if such a thing is all that desirable. By the its nature, the problems start when compiling a list of such ideas because chances are that you will select places that already are popular. That applies as much when perusing travel magazines or holiday brochures as it does when using social media.

One consequence of this is that certain locations become too popular for the sake of sustainability and that leads to restrictions that affect the independent traveller. South American destinations like Machu Pichu and Torres del Paine National Park come to mind here but the problem is spread around the world. Scotland’s Isle of Skye has experienced problems that never made the news  before and you only have to see how many visit well promoted attractions like the Cliffs of Moher to see how many people visit a small number of locations in Ireland at a time during the high season.

This then poses something of a dilemma: do you cater for the visitor numbers or do you restrict them? With wilderness and conservation areas, there is a tendency to do the latter though it does have the consequence of pushing up visitor costs and that may have its benefits for local tourism businesses as you may find on a trip to places in either the Canadian Rockies or Alaska. When you add in short summer tourism seasons, the effect by necessity is more pronounced.

In other destinations, they add in facilities for the extra visitors with some decrying the effect that this has had on Spain’s Mediterranean coastline because of hotel and holiday apartment construction. Parts of the Alps are afflicted like this but in a different way: it is the infrastructure of skiing resorts that hardly help appearances in mountain country during the summer season. Both examples make you wonder at the appropriateness of such developments and they must tug at the heartstrings of anyone who adores mountain and coastal scenery.

Another aspect of any overdevelopment is that you can install something that encourages the otherwise unprepared into wild places without realise the possible dangers that are there. For instance, I seem to have inherited my father’s unease at cliff edges and my knowledge of how slippery limestone can be almost made me shout at people to keep back from the edge on a damp day hike around the Cliffs of Moher and Doolin. It is little wonder that staff are equipped with whistles to direct the unaware away from peril.

There is overcaution too and one example is the boardwalk on Cuilcagh Mountain and how incongruous it looks in the landscape through which it conveys people to the top of the hill shared between Cavan and Fermanagh, between Éire and Northern Ireland. It also does not help that it stops short of the top too but the boggy morass deters most. Another location where path development attracted adverse comment was at Sliabh Liag in County Donegal but it might be that some sense prevailed there in the end.

Hillwalking is a growing pastime in Ireland so there remains a lot to learn in a country where there is neither experience nor tradition of path and track building in such places. Thankfully, organisations like Mountain Meitheal and Mountaineering Ireland together with initiatives like Helping the Hills are starting to address this so lessons are learned from places like Scotland and applied to get sensible solutions to the growing problem of erosion on popular hills. It is something that needs attention as much as securing access for hill wandering in the first place.

The mention of countryside access brings me to another factor that causes some places to feel overloaded: a lack of alternatives. It is not everywhere that has the liberal access rights that are enjoyed in Scotland and across Scandinavia so there can be a very really reduction in the number of places where you can explore. The options may not stop you going to those better known places like Norway’s Preikestolen before finding other quieter hikes nearby as knowledge grows and maps feel more confiding.

It is this last point that inspires the title and the theme runs through Fiona Reynolds’ The Fight for Beauty, a book that I read last autumn. It is not for nothing park rangers in Denali National Park tell you not to walk one after another in a group so a path never develops and that everyone’s backcountry journey is their own. When there is plenty of land for all, we can spread out and find our own space to recharge weary spirits. That is easier when we are not retracing the steps of others all the while and it can have a lighter impact on the countryside too with less erosion caused by many feet and much path widening. While it can be true that we get confined by or own lack of knowledge, physical restrictions caused by not having enough other places to go hardly help either. Overcoming both might be the ultimate answer to the visitor management conundrum.

Sport?

Cooler temperatures have encouraged me to hop upon on a bicycle that is left permanently on a bike trainer. It got so hot at times this past summer that this was the last thing that I have contemplated. Some may think that such an act would be dull but I avoid anything like boredom by catching up with some reading at the same time.

This has been how I came to start through my back issues of the Irish Mountain Log, published by Mountaineering Ireland and one of the few remaining news stand titles that feature Irish hill walking. However, the organisation also covers other similar activities like mountaineering and climbing in both its indoor and outdoor forms.

That may be one reason why its editor insists in calling outdoor activities that take place in hill and mountain country a sport but funding for outdoor activities can come from government sports agencies for whatever reason and Ireland is among those. For instance, the Irish Trails website is funded by the Irish Sports Council.

However, I don’t think of my hill wandering as being sport at all and I also find the expression alienating. To me, sport is a sterile thing with its focus on competition while my motivation for walking through the countryside is as much as about enjoying natural sights and sounds as getting some space to clear my mind. At heart, I am also an explorer so I like to see new sights too. It is about savouring surroundings and experiences rather than having a head filled with thoughts of conquest and victory.

The Irish Mountain Log does feature some of that so I would prefer outdoor-focussed activities to be called something more than a sport even if that attracts some funding. Mountaineering Ireland may support competitive events but they do include mountaineering and hill walking so my suggestion is that the label becomes “sport and outdoor activities” or “sport and outdoor pursuits”. The titles may be longer but they sound more inclusive and might incorporate better the social side of these activities that is important for so many in Ireland.

Making do with the weather that came

After reproaching myself for not doing so for too many years, I set aside some time to explore part of the land of my birth and upbringing. Too often, any such excursions have been fitted in around other activities and needed to cater to the needs of others. It was time for some self-driven explorations of my own, and the idea of doing just that on a trip to West Limerick to attend to Irish business affairs. There was a past occasion when the weather had been so fine that I was tempted to stay on a coach heading for Galway rather than disembarking at Shannon Airport as planned. It was to set the scene for what I did on a six-day stay this summer. As luck would have, the extraordinarily hot sunny weather was gone and a more usual mix was my fare but I made the best of what I was allotted.

Perhaps unsurprisingly then, the city of Galway was my chosen base and its transport connections allowed me to explore a few places beyond its limits. The choices were numerous, so some filtering was in order given the time that I had. Of course, I got to stroll around the city too, with much of that happening on the day of my arrival. An evening of improving weather saw me find the coast near Claddagh and pop out to Mutton Island before venturing as far the perimeter of Salthill. The hills of north Clare lay across Galway Bay and the more extensive sunshine allowed for some photography.

The next day could not be more different and it was tricky to work out what to do, given the predicted rain. Nevertheless, I headed to the Cliffs of Moher where I hiked as far south as Signal Tower before returning north again to pass O’Brien’s Tower and continue along the Burren Way as far as Doolin where I got something to eat before going as far as the pier to see where ferries leave for the Aran Islands and boat trips along the Cliff of Moher are offered. Though damp for much of the time from rain, drizzle and ocean spray, it had been a satisfying day out with the return coach journey taking in such sights as Dunguaire Castel near Kinvarra and Black Head near Ballyvaughan. There even was a short stop to take in the view down from near Corkscrew Hill, though I suspect it was the action of a canny bus driver to stop people standing on a moving coach to take photos of what lay before them.

Thankfully, the following day stayed dry until evening when heavy rain came. During the dry spell, I headed to Recess in hope of walking to the top of Lisoughter hill. However, the sight of a low cloud base made me reconsider my plans so I instead chose a shorter stroll that still gave the desired views over Lough Inagh and towards what could be seen of the clouded Twelve Bens while passing both Derryclare Lough and Glendollagh Lough. After that, I continued to Clifden where a coastal stroll was enjoyed though skies looked laden with moisture. Dark grey cloud cover had been my lot though there was some sunshine around Oughterard as I returned to Galway where some matters needed my attention.

The predicted heavy rain only lasted a few hours and left the next day completely dry so it was time for some longer hiking. This started from Maam Cross where I started along the R336 to reach the Western Way. Someone in a car stopped to ask if I was local but left me to carry on when he learned of my plan. A French family were milling around as I left the road to cross bogland on a bouncy plastic mat on the way to a Coillte forestry plantation. Then, I was led along a boardwalk that lasted for kilometres over a sodden landscape under grey skies with hilltops cloaked in cloud; it felt like a repeat of the previous day at this point. Lackavrea lay to my left all the way to the backs of the Folore River that I would shadow as far as the shore of Lough Corrib. One of the French visitors caught up with me to ask how far it was to the lake in broken English. Maybe I should have tried my French, but the required assistance was provided nonetheless. The boardwalk was left after me at the lake shore for a rough gravel track that lead to one with a smoother surface that itself conveyed me to the narrow road that I followed for the rest of the way to Oughterard. Progress along that was punctuated by various food stops, the first of which had me being wished “Bon Appétit” by someone who arrived in a car for a spot of strolling, and a side trip as far as Lough Seecon. Cloud broke, and the day grew more sunny to leave a fine weather dawdle around Oughterard before grey cloud cover grew again as I awaited a coach back to Galway.

There was one more full day to use after my trot along the Western Way and that allowed me to spend time wandering around Inishmore, the largest of the Aran Islands, with a coach and ferry combination getting me there and back. Once on the island, I found its quieter southern parts as I walked towards Dún Aonghasa. Light rain showers peppered the morning time before growing less frequent as the day progressed, and bright sunshine began to appear so that helped any photographic efforts. The clifftop fort was visited and I could have spent longer there but for my heightened desire to reach my desired ferry connection to the mainland. On the way back along the island’s north shore, I found myself sharing a lane with cyclists and touring minibuses together with horse and trap excursions. As it happened, the horse traffic added odour to the journey courtesy of dung left on the tarmac. The journey had its busy moments, but there were quieter stretches too and I had some time to spare before catching the ferry to Rossaveal where I spent some more time before catching the coach back to Galway.

My departure happened the next morning, but there are reasons to return to this part of Ireland. Any lack of sunshine would not be the main cause because there remains much more to see. Sunlit walking along the Burren Way between Liscannor and Doolin sounds attractive and there is Black Head itself too. Inishbofin is another island that I would like to visit and then there are the smaller members of the Aran Islands. Other parts of Connemara, such as Letterfrack and Leenaun, take my fancy while a walk from Recess to Maam Cross could be another possibility. As things stand, only a start has been made in exploring Clare and Galway while Mayo and Donegal are worth doing too. There could be an Irish hill country and island wandering project yet.