The Mourne Mountains

Percy French sang, “the Mountains of Mourne sweep down to the sea” . . .   We are here for these mountains, which shocks the Irish, and today we decided to just head to the Mournes, although the weather looked dodgy.

The Mourne Wall is absolutely amazing, it is a 22 mile, or 35.5 km, dry stacked, stone wall that took more than 18 years to complete, it was finished in 1922.  The Mourne Wall connects the summits of 15 mountains, it tops out in places at 8 feet high and is 3 feet wide.  The wall was constructed to prevent sheep and cattle from entering the Silent Valley reservoir area, which supplies water to the region.

It was raining this morning when we left Newcastle, but it had tapered off to a drizzle by the time we parked the car.  We took on Slieve Binnian, a mucky slog up the mountain, alongside the wall of stone. We couldn’t see the top of the mountain for cloud cover, but it was supposed to clear in the afternoon.  We met a lot of Irish walkers on our ascent, some were coming down, but the majority were on their way up.

When we hike in Canada, we are rarely passed, we tend to hike faster than most people even though they are about a 1/3 of John’s age.  But the Irish are part of that great walking culture that is prevalent in Scotland and England.  We passed some of the more out of shape types, but a couple of young people flew by us.  The young woman was totally hilarious, she was talking about her heart being ready to give out.  I said that I guess there are other things to do on a Sunday and she replied, ‘like drink tea and watch shit tv.’  I just about died laughing.  Later on at the summit, she commented that it all sounded like such a great idea to climb Binnian last night in the pub after a couple of drinks, but now she thought it wasn’t such a great idea.

There were loads of people hiking and more kept on coming as the day wore on.  Just as we were about to leave the summit we met a dad and his two young boys.  I was so favourably impressed with this, so I said that is great that such young kids were hiking.  The dad said that today is the birthday of the older boy and he wanted to walk up Binnian on his birthday.  I said ‘are you ever a cool kid.’  His face totally lit up and I received the biggest smile that has ever been directed my way.

When we got to the summit, we couldn’t see much due to cloud.  We stood at the top and had a tea that we had dragged up with us, this is not something we would ever do, but thought it would be a good idea to have a warm drink on a cool day.  The tea was divine.  As there was so much low cloud, we thought we would have to walk back down the mucky slog, but after the cloud cleared, we decided to continue on with the ridge walk to the north and complete a circuit.  This made for a great hike, as we got to see some really bizarre rock formations.

It took a lot longer to descent than we anticipated because there are several levels of slopes, just when we thought we were almost down, another slope would be there.

Once we got to a flat section, which continued on to meet up with our approach at the beginning, we met people who were packing little kids, maybe one or two year olds.  One was in a backpack rig and the older one was in a rig that the mom had on in front.  Well, we were completely floored by this and told them how unreal it was that they were packing kids on their walk, I told them they have a real walking culture here.  The Irish people are so awesome, and we absolutely love them.  We spent a decent amount of time yakking to them on the trail.

After we got back to the car, which took forever, we sped home for tea.  The walk took us about 4.5 hours, and elevation gain is unknown, approximately 2500 feet.  All of the Irish think we should hike Slieve Donard, which is the highest mountain in Northern Ireland, if we are capable of walking tomorrow, we may take a crack at it.

Summit in the mist

View from the summit

The Back Castles

Gap in the wall

The wall going downhill

View of the sea from Sieve Binnian

Summit Tor

The Mourne Wall ascending and descending Slieve Donard

North Tor

Buzzard's Roost (seriously)

History of Ireland, Second Installment

Patrick, the Patron Saint of Ireland is said to have arrived in 432 AD.  He said he was captured by Irish raiders at his home in Britain and worked as a slave in Ireland for six years.  Having escaped, he managed to return home and then came back to Ireland as a missionary.  Patrick basically wrote himself into the history of Ireland, but his writings lacked dates, names, places, and he did not expand upon what he actually did, the blanks have been filled in by pure legend.  It is said that Irish scholars, who settled in Europe, started the tradition of celebrating St. Patrick’s Day, beginning in the 9th century.  Ironically, the parades and parties of today are more in keeping with a pagan feast and celebration than a Christian holy day.

We really don’t know much about the pagan practices of the Irish, although sun worship, woods, rivers and wells were sacred.  The Christians borrowed pagan practices as they knew that the people would not give up their traditions.  The pagan gods and goddesses became Christian saints; the conversion from paganism to Christianity took hundreds of years.

Early social organization consisted of petty kingdoms but the kings were not above poets, scholars or bishops, unlike England, which moved toward a single monarchy.  Farmsteads were surrounded by stone walls, although they were not fortified.  Wealth was determined by the size of the herd of cattle owned.

Monasteries became the centre of Irish culture.  While Europe fell into the ‘Dark Ages’ with the collapse of the Roman Empire, the Irish monks produced manuscripts and studied Latin, and foreign students came to Ireland to study.  Irish monks also travelled to Britain and to Europe, to establish monasteries.

The Roman Christian structure was known as the diocesan model, where bishops controlled junior priests and all the churches within their jurisdiction.  In Ireland, the structure was a monastic one, because of the link between the local church and the local king.  The church sat on tribal land which was not to leave the tribe, and many of the first priests were from the king’s family.  The monastery was ruled by an abbot who was often related to the kings and may not have been a priest. Much like the tribal kings, the monasteries also feuded with each other to gain power.

In the 9th century, the monasteries were major population centres, the monks married, had children and the tenant farmers worked the land.  The monasteries had wealth in the form of silver and gold.