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| General | Whatever you want to say that doesn't fit under the comments about places or another forum. |
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| Post details | Post (Contract pics) | ||
| Colin Murphy 2022-05-09 15:24:58 |
Gathering 2022
A grand night indeed in the Lansdowne Hotel on Friday May 6, with renowned Irish and Scottish hillwalking author Anne Morrissey and mountain runner Richard Nunan the fascinating speakers. And then there were two years of awards to catch up with! |
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| Bunsen7 2022-05-03 15:57:24 |
Vartry Upper Reservoir Trail Closed due to le
A section of the scenic way-marked flat national trail looping around the upper Vartry reservoir near Roundwood, Wicklow, has been closed to the public due to the landowner withdrawing access. The relevant section runs along the perimeter of a paintballing business, effectively rendering the would-be loop trail completely impassable.Opened to fanfare in 2018 by none other than Leo Varadkar himself, (and then advertised on RTE's tracks and trails - by presumably some likeable man and his mammy) the route is sadly now blocked by a terribly impressive metal fence, which extends over the lake via 2 elongated wooden planks with a large piece of corrugated metal to boot. This fence is utterly impenetrable, I would be shocked if this was constructed by a council worker, definitely VAT and premium private sector rates charged on this bit of work. If you prefer a triathlon to a Sunday stroll, you could still access this section if you swim or canoe around, and good luck to you. Speaking to some local gents further along the way, the wholly unsubstantiated rumour circulating is that a (dog) walker may have suffered a close encounter with a paintball, which splattered paint onto the walker's coat. However, the walker alerted the authorities and the rest as they say is, well, in the pockets of the lawyers. [My detest of this trail closure is tempered by memories of newspaper reports on a recent legal case where a man shot himself in the eye with a paintball and was left holding said eye in his hand, and the reality that a sizeable number of would-be paintballers are Call of Duty computer game playing lads on Stags that might get a kick out of popping someone on the back of the head with their weapon.] Alas, signage at the trailhead is not very clear, and you can unwittingly find yourself caught out if unawares, so be warned. https://www.sportireland.ie/outdoors/walking/trails/roundwood-reservoir-upper-vartry-trail |
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| BleckCra 2022-04-27 14:56:15 |
STACKS AND STONES
Touring Ireland, always remember not "to start from here".Croagh Patrick? "Well, I wouldn't start from here." O'Connell Street? "I wouldn't start from here". The Atlantic Ocean? "Not from here." I have the Blue Stacks on the bucket list and have started from every wrong "here" .... there. Still, I am tracking them down - with a run out into Brown's Hill, Croaghanirwore and Croaghnageer; another, a loop 'round the Croaghgorm high range proper; and recently Binnasruell, Lavagh Beg and Lavagh More. Having checked out all the wrong "heres" for Carnaween, an imposing, rocky Ben on the range's Western flanks, I expect to start from one of them in due course. .... but then we run into placename etymology (a hobby horse of mine) and a busted stile before we even get started. It never fails to amaze me how placename translation into English is bad and so often very bad. Coming from airts where English and Lallan Scots are spoken but all the placenames are Gaelic or GalGael, I have been fascinated by placename etymology .... for... well ... ever. Don't start me with Carrauntoohil or Slieve Donard .... !! So the given for Carnaween is Carn na nEan from "bird" or "wealth" or some other concoction. Carnaneen is never going to be Carnaween. Into English, "meen" is high pasture. In Irish, lenition (or seimhiu) softens mathair to mo mhathair and meen to (pron) ween. If the translators could get their noses out of the library books and look at a map of Carnaween they would see meens everywhere. Some beginner Irish wouldn't go wrong either. Coming to mountainviews for some thoughts on an ascent, I discover an even more outlandish translation. "Cairn of the Hero". When there are tens of named high pastures staring you in the face, you do have to ask why - and I guess the answer is fiction is more exciting than fact. Hero or High pasture? No contest. Not a good place to start from - I definitely wouldn't start from here. Incidentally ..... Carrauntoohil - Toole or O'Toole's Cairn. Although to be honest, "Carn" is fine with me. Donard - High Fort or High Brown Hill (in context). That's it. No sickles, no saints. (Note - this is not a pop at mountainviews translations or mudandroutes/hillbagging (the bird theme) but at the whole procedure in general). I would welcome thoughts. Also available in Irish. |
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| Onzy 2022-04-20 07:47:45 |
MV 2022 Gathering!!
After missing a year, the MV Gathering is back! |
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| Bobbio1969 2022-03-25 20:37:55 |
Lon/Lat via Extra Details
Excellent, Simon, thanks very much. Loads of info there.Is there any way to persuade Lon/Lat to appear instead of, or in addition to, grid references in a list of summits, as in e.g. Arderins? |
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| simon3 2022-03-24 08:06:59 |
Re Unsatisfactory Irish Grid to Lat/Long
Bobbio, if you click Extra Detail for a summit, MV will give information such as this: Longitude: -8.085518, Latitude: 52.624451 , Easting: 194259, Northing: 152539 Prominence: 158m, Isolation: 1.6km, Has trig pillar ITM: 594209 652583 Note: instead of Lat/Long MV like many other websites uses Lon/Lat. Reason? To keep the form consistent between grid refs which always easting/northing with earth centred lon and lat. |
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| Bobbio1969 2022-03-23 23:03:59 |
Unsatisfactory Irish Grid to Lat/Long coordin
Wishing to locate in Google Earth (input latitude, longitude) some of the Arderins, located on Irish Grid by MV (thanks for the spelling Simon!), I downloaded GridInquest2, claimed to be a co-ordinate converter, from the OSI website. It is an extremely unsatisfactory co-ordinate converter - any Irish Grid points in Northern Ireland that are not close to the Border are given 0 latitude and 0 longitude, or "Coordinate outside Transformation...", depending on whether interactive or text file mode. So this software ignores maybe a quarter of the island of Ireland. What a waste of time and space. |
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| Bobbio1969 2022-03-19 09:29:51 |
Height errors on Irish summits in German BKG
As I indicated, it appears to be a messier problem than which ellipsoid - more like somebody spilled a bottle of digital ink over the file. Have a look at Sliabh Bán (Slievebaun. Slievebawn to taste) in Blackstairs: 525 according to MV, 496 m according to BKG, so -29 m, but about 1 km north Blackstairs itself is 732 by MV; 787 by BKG, so +55. On the other hand Djouce agrees within a metre by both BKG and MV, A very pimply ellipsoid indeed would be needed to reconcile those discepancies |
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| simon3 2022-03-19 07:21:12 |
Re BKG summit heights.
Yes indeed this map does indeed seem to have errors. I found the BKG map at http://sg.geodatenzentrum.de/web_bkg_webmap/applications/bkgmaps/minimal.html if anyone wants to look. And with a quick check for one summit, Mullacor, which we measured at 660.7m their height was 706. Their height is 45.3 high which confirms there is at least one error. BKG are using Open Street Map and most of the heights for this data set for Irish summits were set to WGS 84 ellipsoid heights, not height above sea level. However a MV volunteer has corrected many of these to use the above sea level values that MV has. Other map makers in Ireland such as OSI also use above sea level. Many of these have come from MV's own measurements using a surveying GPS (accurate to .1m). It would appear that BKG have not refreshed their rendering of OSM data recently. MV uses another map layer based on OSM called OpenTopoMap. Generally they correct their online map within around 3 weeks of our corrections. Thanks for describing this Bobbio1969. Incidentally it's spelt "Arderins" |
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| Bobbio1969 2022-03-18 22:35:57 |
Height errors on Irish summits in German BKG
I have recently discovered that the Bundesamt fuer Kartographie und Geodaesie (BKG) has published a topo map that has erroneous heights for nearly all the Ardeerin summits in Wicklow, Dublin and Wexford; this has been confirmed by BKG themselves, after an original snooty response. I raised the issue with BKG at the beginning of March, but the map is still online - I suppose they can't just pull it without inconveniencing a lot of users. I have no idea if this is just a localised problem - I have looked only at those Ardeerins in my local region. Most of the errors add typically about 46 to 53 m to the accepted heights, but some heights are almost correct, and there are a few summits that actually get shrunk; so it's not a simple matter of a blanket addition, or a quibble over the geoid in use. I came across this rather astonishing situation while using PhotoEphemeris, a program to figure out the bearings of sunrise, sunset etc. for photographers: this program just happens to overlay its computed bearings on a topo map provided (presumably free) by BKG. I hope to hear eventually from BKG just how they screwed up, but in the meantime do not rely on BKG's topo map! |
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