Gortnageragh in May

On Tuesday 26/05/2010 I left Doon and headed for Gortnageragh. I turned right in Doon at the convent and up past the CBS. I followed this road until I came to Curraghmarky bridge. I spoke to the farmer and his family here and got permission to park my cark above his farmhouse. He told me to go past the old house and just at the new one there is a track leading off to the right. I followed this up as far as the forest road. I could have turned right here and reached the mast but I needed a bit of a climb. I turned left when I hit the forest road and turned right soon after up a firebreak, some electric fence on the firebreak. I hit a second firebreak and turned right to the summit and the mast. Had a cup of tea and looked at 5 different counties. An easy walk, but I had just completed foildearg and was now heading for Knocknastanna. I met a sixtynine year old man running around the woods. Took my breath away. well done old timer Linkback: mountainviews.ie/summit/746/comment/5831/

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Laying down a marker

This is a nice little hill with good tracks most of the way to the summit, which is marked with a trig pillar. I always think it's nice to reach the top and find it marked in some way, either by a trig or cairn. Anyway, I was also fortunate to do this on a crisp, blue sky winter's day, which transformed otherwise ordinary fields of growth into things of beauty. Linkback: mountainviews.ie/summit/746/comment/23771/

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Climbing Jacobs Ladder

Through one thing and another I haven't climbed a new hill or entered a new comment on Mountainviews in several months.After the passing of a dear friend and relative, last Saturday I finally decided to have a go at the final five hills on my local 100 list which was made up of some modest tops in the Shannon region.

The first of the hills to fall was Gortnageragh, an easy walk on a forest track to the summit.
The trig pillar is in a grassy field as you emerge from the forest with a telephone mast nearby.
It was a hazy day but I was happy to capture an image of "Jacobs Ladder".
Crepuscular rays, to give them their proper name, ( also known as God Rays), are rays of sunlight that appear to radiate from a single point in the sky.
These rays, which stream through gaps in cloud cover, are columns of sunlit air separated by darker cloud-shadowed areas. The name comes from their frequent occurrences during crepuscular hours (those around dawn and dusk), when the contrasts between light and dark are the greatest.
Crepuscular comes from the Latin word crepusculum meaning twilight and though it wasn't twilight the overcast day had that feel to it.

Yeats' poem "Into the Twilight" is probably too sentimental and too forlorn
for many but seems to strike the right chord.

"Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill:
For there the mystical brotherhood
Of sun and moon and hollow and wood
And river and stream work out their will;

And God stands winding His lonely horn,
And time and the world are ever in flight;
And love is less kind than the grey twilight,
And hope is less dear than the dew of the morn" Linkback: mountainviews.ie/summit/746/comment/6643/

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