Ballinafad has much to be desired. No dependable internet, no restaurant, no live music and pretty much anything you should find of a town of any size, but you got to count its blessings. As I write this at dusk, fighting off some midges, I’m watching the swans float along Lough Arrow.
The walk was crap at first. It just retraced a bike ride I had been on recently, you know, on a quiet farm road walled in by the hedgerows which also wall in cattle and sheep and the farm houses with their peat drying under a roof and their “poly-tunnel” gardens. I guess an idyllic Irish setting for most, but for me, who has seen this scene a bit too much and is maybe a bit jaded.
We found the sign for the trail, which was a road, until the trail was a high grassy and brambly patch walled in by two stone walls. After Julie was moving brambles in front of herself to her back, I was busy picking leaves of Filapedula, or meadowsweet ,which in full flower right now. (planning on making a tea later). And I guess I did get scraped a few times, but nothing as bad as all the midges eating behind my ears, my scalp and that spot above my belt line.
As we got on this overgrown trail, the wind picked up and the rain started coming down. Hard. And the trail switched from tall grassy, to mucky wetland, and those two stone walls crumbled if you touched them. Farther on, passing the last sheep meadow, the canyon came into view, which back in the day, people buried their loved ones in this valley. It was almost wilderness, except for the crumbling stone piles that were a house. Bones extracted from this valley were brought to the archeologists home for further study. As
the story goes, the couple started having weird
occurrences happening in their house, and they had to demand a spot in the museum for these bones, to help save their own sanity.
We walked across the canyon and into a raised bog, no doubt harvested many times over the millennium. They harvest the “turf” or the peat, dry it, then burn it to heat homes and to cook over. This is still occurring, although because it is a very unsustainable harvest practice, and bogs are one of the few carbon retention areas or “sinks” this is going out of fashion. The fierce wind and rain hit us again and we got back onto a road and circled up to the
megalithic tombs. They look like heaps of stone, but have a small entrance, that you can crawl through and open up once inside, with an amazing structure of solid stone. These are over 5000 years old, older than the pyramids, but maybe not quite as spectacular. Staying inside the tomb to avoid another onslaught of rain and wind, we then clambered down another road, towards lough Arrow, through horse and sheep pastures to the main highway. Two Indian guys gave us a lift back to Ballinafad. You mentioned you are looking into opening a take-away curry restaurant? I think Ballinafad wouldn’t be a bad spot.
Ballinafad has much to be desired. No dependable internet, no restaurant, no live music and pretty much anything you should find of a town of any size, but you got to count its blessings. As I write this at dusk, fighting off some midges, I’m watching the swans float along Lough Arrow.
The walk was crap at first. It just retraced a bike ride I had been on recently, you know, on a quiet farm road walled in by the hedgerows which also wall in cattle and sheep and the farm houses with their peat drying under a roof and their “poly-tunnel” gardens. I guess an idyllic Irish setting for most, but for me, who has seen this scene a bit too much and is maybe a bit jaded.
We found the sign for the trail, which was a road, until the trail was a high grassy and brambly patch walled in by two stone walls. After Julie was moving brambles in front of herself to her back, I was busy picking leaves of Filapedula, or meadowsweet ,which in full flower right now. (planning on making a tea later). And I guess I did get scraped a few times, but nothing as bad as all the midges eating behind my ears, my scalp and that spot above my belt line.
As we got on this overgrown trail, the wind picked up and the rain started coming down. Hard. And the trail switched from tall grassy, to mucky wetland, and those two stone walls crumbled if you touched them. Farther on, passing the last sheep meadow, the canyon came into view, which back in the day, people buried their loved ones in this valley. It was almost wilderness, except for the crumbling stone piles that were a house. Bones extracted from this valley were brought to the archeologists home for further study. As
the story goes, the couple started having weird 
occurrences happening in their house, and they had to demand a spot in the museum for these bones, to help save their own sanity.
We walked across the canyon and into a raised bog, no doubt harvested many times over the millennium. They harvest the “turf” or the peat, dry it, then burn it to heat homes and to cook over. This is still occurring, although because it is a very unsustainable harvest practice, and bogs are one of the few carbon retention areas or “sinks” this is going out of fashion. The fierce wind and rain hit us again and we got back onto a road and circled up to the megalithic tombs. They look like heaps of stone, but have a small entrance, that you can crawl through and open up once inside, with an amazing structure of solid stone. These are over 5000 years old, older than the pyramids, but maybe not quite as spectacular. Staying inside the tomb to avoid another onslaught of rain and wind, we then clambered down another road, towards lough Arrow, through horse and sheep pastures to the main highway. Two Indian guys gave us a lift back to Ballinafad. You mentioned you are looking into opening a take-away curry restaurant? I think Ballinafad wouldn’t be a bad spot.
0 comments:
Post a Comment