The camp was totally untrammeled last night and though it was grey and mizzly first thing this morning we decided to deny our inner-wimp and make the best of the fantastic hiking and biking trails that criss-cross the area.
By around 8.30am Emma was up and (literally) running whilst I was pressing on down formal red routes on my gravel bike.
The bike trails in the area really are spectacularly prepared and maintained. There are sections covering all grades right up to and including pure MTB black routes. I saw the start of a couple of these but wasn't even slightly tempted to give them a go. I'm no MTBer and don't even own an MTB. I'm quite sure that tipping off the edge of the world on to one of these routes on my gravel bike would have meant a professional response that involved at least ketamine and a spine-board. The routes looked simply insane. Anyway, a massive kudos to Coillte for putting this facility together. It's vast, professional and remarkable.
Post run and bike we had a steady potter through the rest of the Slieve Bloom mountains and even extended the experience by detouring up over a pass called The Cut. The views from this pass were awesome (pic) so we stopped on the tops and had lunch. Less awesome was the state of the formal picnic areas and lay-byes thereabouts; they were utterly spoiled by fast food packaging, beer tins, plastic bottles, energy drink tins, butt-ends, random bits of clothing and soiled toilet paper. Who actually does this?
Once off the mountains we basically headed east in order to be within striking distance of Dublin to catch the ferry back to Wales tomorrow. The drive was unspectacular but in places challenging, again because of the extraordinarily narrow roads and speed and volume of traffic.
In a couple of spots near the honeypot of Glendalough we again saw clusters of pitched-up living vans that had basically transformed public viewing points into campsites and a later check sure enough revealed these spots on the various web-based impact heavily on nature and really irritate local communities platforms. Muppetry writ large. Park4Night, Turn2Shite.
We're currently to be found at the coordinates shown; the same spot we overnighted at when we first arrived in Ireland almost a fortnight ago. It's been steady bird-wise but we have had a really excellent sighting of a fox laid up and half dozing on a wall about 70 metres away. Funnily enough, a few years ago we had a very similar experience here but the animal at that time was half dozing on a tree stump. If it's the same fox then it seems to be pretty much on top of things.
For completeness, the spot we're in is also festooned with empty beer tins and other random bits of food packaging people have deemed it's OK to chuck into the hedge bottom.
Post composed at 22:00 on Wednesday 29th July from our intended overnighting spot N 53.04575°, W 06.27166° / http://maps.google.com/maps?q=loc:53.04575%2C-06.27166
