Slí na Sláinte

 The first thing I realized on my inaugural hike here was that this was not going to be like any hike I had ever taken in the States. An initial clue should have been the preponderance of gaiters on the walkers who were suiting up in the car park, which they tied on over their hiking pants, running the bottom strap under their boots. The second was the number of walking sticks and poles. At least half the walkers had them, and I was beginning to regret the decision I had made not to purchase a set of poles before I left. The third was the boots themselves. They were serious boots, high on their legs, sometimes full leather, with solid soles and the kind of ankle support that looked like it would do for snowshoeing.

After registering at the Slievebloom Walking Festival headquarters, the town hall in Kinnitty, we caravaned about five miles to the start of the walk (hike is not a word that is used here, where walk means everything from an evening constitutional to a full-blown days-long trek). Two novice walkers offered me a lift, which I gratefully accepted; I would have probably made a fool of myself trying to drive along the farm track that we followed. Suddenly we stopped in the middle of the lane, and the walk leader told us to leave the cars there; at the end of the walk we would reverse out, another reason for me to be thankful for my carpool.

The leader himself, Frank, stood in the bed of his pickup at the front of the long line of parked cars and gave us a brief assessment of what to expect. At the registration I kept hearing people ask, How wet will it be? At the time I wondered, if you want to hike in Ireland shouldn't you expect a bit of wet? This was probably the most naive thinking I have done here so far. Frank told us we would walk on mostly level ground for a mile or so, then start to climb, then walk along the top of the ridge before descending back down through a small forest back to the cars. Part of the walk would be through timber cutting areas on tree farms, some recently harvested and other with new planting. The walk would be about 10k, or a little over 6 miles. This sounded perfect for my first real walk here. I had roughly the right kind of gear, minus the gaiters, and had done many a 6 mile hike through various elevations. This would be fun.

 Frank, who hopped out of the truck carrying an iron pole for a walking stick, didn't bother with boots. He and his two pals walked in wellies, which should have been another clue, although at the time I thought that either their wellies were a great deal more comfortable than the ones I had bought at the street market so I could walk in the fields at the farm or they knew something I didn't. I don't know about the former, but the latter was certainly true.

No one ever took a count of the crowd, but there must have been at least 35 people on the walk. The group had slightly more women than men, but the number of young men was surprising.  The couple who had given me a lift, Rhona and Desi, had driven in, like me, for the day. There were two girls about 10 and 12 walking with their mother, clearly locals. But most of the walkers had come from Dublin. They were staying for the entire three-day festival, and they were serious walkers. For them this walk would be their second in two days; many of them would take a final walk on Monday. Rhona and Desi were the only inexperienced walkers there.

We set out along the farm track but within five minutes we had plunged down a steep and very slippery grassy slope in a small woods, forded a stream, dug our way up the other side and squished along an open meadow past some very watchful cattle that Frank shooed away with his stick. Then we began our long but gentle ascent on a road of sorts that had been dug out for the trucks coming from the sandstone quarry that we were soon to pass. The quarry has taken out a good chunk of one of the hills. It is still active, its mounds of stone obscuring what otherwise would have been spectacular views of the countryside. At the top of the hill we hit the real meat of the walk, and I finally began to understand why so many people asked about the wet. Our walk was set straight through a 

bog, a piece of nature I had been anxious to acquaint myself with, although I wouldn't have necessarily chosen this particular firsthand way of learning about it. The bog was not big by Irish standards, but it went on for miles in all directions, a dark sea of muck which at first glance offered little in the way of flora. Whatever animals might live there would not be in evidence to us, and it was difficult to imagine what could survive in this harshness. For the next few miles all you could hear was the squelch of boots in the muck as we trekked single file through the bog. Occasionally Frank or his friend would stop to help us get through a particularly mucky area. Once as I was being given a boost over a small rivulet of water running through the bog my right foot slipped in up past my knee. Pulling it out again took all my strength and the aid of Frank's powerful arm, and I realized just how dense and terrifying this most primeval of nature's material was.

At almost no point did we follow a formal pathway. This is not a walk through carefully tended ranger trails. Once we left the few tracks that had been made for farm or quarry lorries, we were out in completely unmarked fields. The occasional stick stuck into the ground were Frank's personal markers; he had walked the terrain on Thursday and marked his way so that he could re-trace his steps and get us back to the cars in the posted time period of about four hours. 

By now I was caked with mud, but my boots and socks were keeping my feet dry; thank goodness for North Face. We set out through the drier fields of heather, which I thought would surely be easier than the slippery bog. But the clumps of heather are not only tough and unyielding, the fields they grow in are full of holes hidden by the density of the plants so that your foot sinks without warning and if you're not careful you could easily sprain an ankle in one of them. This is the point when I realized that dry feet were only one necessity on a walk like this; the other was ankle support, and my lovely boots, which have served me well on the dry California trails, were no match for this pitted and deceptive terrain.

Still, the day had finally turned glorious after some sudden showers, the air was as clean as I have ever breathed, out here where no machine could penetrate the land, and the group of walkers was as friendly and amenable as any group of walkers is, with the camaraderie of a shared mission and the collective abandonment of stress. I heard about trips to the States, though rarely as far as California, I got pointers on how to find set dancing lessons and where the next walking festival would be, I spoke with a woman who might be a relative and promised her I would do some searching for Annie Tyrrell, c. 1860, although I am sure I won't have any luck with that. A barrister explained the Irish system of defense and prosecution to me, and I was offered a piece of ginger cake by Rhona and Desi in exchange for my cashews and the last of the dried cranberries I had brought with me from California.

Rhona and Desi dropped me off back at the car park, now nearly empty, as we were one of the last cars to reverse down the farm track. They headed off on a picnic. I changed out of my filthy hiking pants and into a clean pair of jeans behind the relative privacy of the open car door, then headed into Birr, a heritage town about 15 kilometers from Kinnitty. Whatever else the day had brought in the way of unusual experiences, I am positive that this is the first time I have ever wound down from a rigorous hike with a late-afternoon stroll through the grounds of a seventeeth-century castle.