Central Maumturks – 13/4/2007

A few days back, I asked Dave if he wanted to do something silly on the Friday, since it would be the two of us walking. Actually, the word I used was abusive. He was keen. We picked a circular moderate-difficult 12km route in the Central Maumturks. The taste of the 12 Bens marked difficult seemed a bit excessive on the silly scale given our lack of experience and time constraints. We needed to survive it and get back to Galway to meet Kate at the bus. The Central Maumturks walk promised two challenging summits and nice views around Connemara. We left relatively early on Friday and headed back the way I came in from Thursday.

We were the first at the starting car park. The route had us walk from Mamean to a shrine of sorts (apparently the walk was blessed by St. Patrick?) and then up the side of the first hill. Like every other walk I had done so far, this walk, too, was very different. The rock was a mix of quartz and something else, or something elses, that I didn’t recognise. The farther we climbed, the more rocky the hill got. Also, the more wind we encountered. With what looked like the first summit cairn in sight, we found a sheltered spot to enjoy lunch and sunshine.

After lunch, we reached the summit cairn within about another 20 minutes of walking. The views were impressive, as were the scree slopes down all around. We looked at the book and the map to decide the best path to the second hill, whose summit was beyond our view. It looked like multiple ridge crossings and multiple summits before we would reach the true summit. I was grateful it wasn’t windier because the second ridge crossing looked quite exposed given the wind’s current direction.

We set off down one of the scree slopes to the ridge crossing. Occasionally, a clear path was evident but then it would disappear among the rocks. We worked our way up the other side and eventually around to the higher, exposed ridge crossing. The second summit became visible, a lone cairn in the distance. The ridge crossing was simpler than I expected. Because of the wind, I stayed on the windward side of the hill for the next bit of climbing. In retrospect, and, of course, once I saw the leeward side, it would have been better for climbing. We took a short break behind this first summit before continuing toward the true summit.

As we approached the true summit, three summit cairns became evident. When we reached the summit, I put wee stones on each cairn, not wanting to make any one feel better or the others feel slighted.

We took a few photos, took a few minutes rest and then looked for the safest route down. Nothing looked ideal so we just started walking. Dave led the way for most of it, occasionally bursting into a labrador retriever style run down the hill slope. I took my usual slow and deliberate pace. Occasional squelches through muck suggested the walk would have been very different had Ireland been enjoying more characteristic weather for April.

From nearly the bottom of the hill, we had to work our way back to the road in the distance. Rather than straight line, I suggested we follow the hill around to help minimise the distance walked on the road. Eventually houses came into view and we chose then to walk out to the road rather than traipse through someone’s garden later.

The walk along the road was much longer than either of us expected. Over each wee hill, we expected to see the car park but didn’t. We encountered a few other walkers, some social and others not. Finally, the car park came into view, with a few children sprawled in the heather between it and us. One large family appeared to be enjoying a roadside picnic; they belonged to the anti-social walkers we had encountered. We changed out of boots, checked the time and made our way back to Galway to retrieve Susan and Kate from the bus depot.