The notion that anyone would upload a track essentially showing a walk along the RTE Mast road to the summit of Kippure no doubt seems a bit daft. I had assumed that the walk would be merely a shameful exercise in bagging a tamed mountain, crowned by a mini Eiffel Tower, a testament to man’s triumph over the land, a task to be completed as part of “the List”, not to be enjoyed. But I took a bit of a mad notion to go up Kippure at night (9pm on a Friday in November), and this turned the walk into something quite awesome. I had expected that some cars would come and go past the entrance gate: there were none. Within a few minutes of my setting off it felt like I was all alone in the wilderness with stars spattered across the universe, and the edges of the known world brought into relief by the backlighting of the city. I felt strangely self-sufficient in my gear, with my headlight fixed a few metres ahead, like an astronaut floating in space. This contributed to a sense that I could simply keep moving, with only short pauses for rest. As I rose I saw streaks of city light glistening, and wondered if the Love/Hate brigade might have come up from there to lie in wait for me, but that, I understand, is not their modus operandi. The flashing of the summit beacon was a welcoming lighthouse that guided my path. At a distance from it there was no sense of alienation. But , face to face, the summit paraphernalia was like a scene from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I half expected a disembodied voice to guide me to an alien ship, or, at the very least, a security man to speak through loudspeakers to advise me of imminent arrest. There was none of it. I walked around the back of the fenced off compound and found the trig pillar, but more significantly I saw Dublin twinkling like diamond studded yellow frost , a great sea of light, in complete contrast to the dark plateau behind. The poem that jumped into my head will be familiar to you all:
Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
William Butler Yeats