Photo courtesy of Patrick Wodhams – More photo’s here.
The 2015 Christmas walk was held on Tuesday 29th Dec 2015. This year we continued our traditional practice in following sections of the Dublin Way for our annual Christmas Walk. Twenty seven of us gathered on the Tuesday after Christmas at Killakee carpark, departure was scheduled for 11.30. The day was overcast with a light wind. A major storm was forecast to come in later in the day but we had a gap of about three hours to complete our trek.
From the car park we followed the road around to the entrance of Cruagh wood. There we took the trail eastward until we reached open ground on Cruagh Mountain. Then up onto the mountain; the track we followed was more of a stream with continuous pools with flowing water, there had been a lot of rain the previous night. The higher we got the wind in our faces increased to about 40 knts. At the top of the mountain we picked up another wider track, again very wet which took us across Killakee Mountain to the Feather Bed road (Military Rd). We followed the road northwards and at the next junction veered left towards Piperstown. Bohernabreena lakes were below us to our left. The wind coming off Kippure was getting stronger all the time. After about half a Km we turned right into the wood and took a lunch break sheltering behind stacks of large logs. Heading eastward we followed a raised track through a felled wood and back onto the Featherbed road which brought us quickly back to the car park. It took us just less than three hours and we covered 8.5 Km. A good walk in varied terrain with mixed conditions.
Our thanks to Brendan Peavoy & Seamus Greene for organising.
Article by Peter Smyth