Glorious weather unveils our beautiful country
Not only was there the ambient mixture of sea and lake waters, but these reflected a blue, cloudless sky and the mountains overshadowing them, their wooded slopes, still bright with foliage so deep into the year, with small, green pastures mirrored like the legendary emeralds on the still, brown water.
Wherever I travel on this island, there is always beauty in the natural features. No vistas are indifferent. If there is ugliness, it is only where man has interfered.
I had wanted to do some Kerry trails for my walking column on the Outdoor page of the Monday Examiner. Investing our faith — and our fate — in the weather forecast, my wife and I left lovely West Cork and went to Kerry for the day. We stayed for two.
So breathtaking was the world we encountered on the Saturday, when we travelled along the Beara side of Kenmare Bay and walked at Lehid Bridge and then at Glanmore Lake, that when darkness fell — all too soon — we booked into a B&B and set the alarm for early the next morning. We would wear ourselves out with walking and savour every possible moment of the glorious Beara peninsula before flopping down in some hostelry to watch the Ireland-New Zealand rugby match.
As the sun crept over the Caha Mountains, we were already at Gleninchaquin Park, sitting beneath two waterfalls pouring like twin streams of creamy Kerry milk down 140 metres of sheer rock as black as basalt.
Behind us, the sound of falling water, ahead, the Gleninchaquin lakes strung out beyond the green pasture at the valley head, with white sheep grazing between solitary oaks and birch trees, their crowns still in leaf, russet and lemon yellow, as elegant and perfectly shaped as if they had been topiaried by a team of gardeners in some municipal showpiece.
Not so, Donal Corkery, the park administrator told us; they were as nature had made them, unaltered by human hand. Justly proud of the landscape which his family have owned and farmed for 130 years, he knows its geology, history and botany.
The solitary trees, so resplendent in their beauty were, he said, the fortunate survivors of the oak forest that had once blanketed the glen but were felled for charcoal-making during the Industrial Revolution.
Anywhere one turned a sod, one came upon ash, evidence of the charcoal burners. It was, of course a tragedy. But yet, there were still small copses following the river along the lower valley, birch and alder, oak and aspen, and forest still clinging to the steep mountainside across the lakes.
Gleninchaquin offers the visitor six marked paths through its magnificent scenery. Some take one high into the mountains, to the small, dark brown corrie lakes, some wander through the lowlands amongst trees, brown bogs and green pastures.
The higher one climbs, the more breath-taking are the views, but one does not have to be a practiced hill-walker to take the path that ascends to a rough-hewn bench and table below Cumeenaloughan corrie lake, one of the two tarns whose waters feed the string of lakes in the glaciated valley below.
Donal Corkery drove us to that perch and left us. The view and the morning so transformed the world that one would want to live forever — not that one doesn’t want to anyway; it is in our nature to hope for the impossible, it seems.
We set off walking on a hill path taking us ever higher, the valley below us lit by the morning sun streaming over the brown bogs, still lakes and golden copses all the way past Kenmare Bay, hidden by the contours, to the horizon of the Macgillicuddy Reeks on far off Iveragh. Not a single cloud punctuated the sky.
By the time we descended, we were ready to seek a late lunch and a TV screen to watch the historic game. New Zealand may have closely bested us in rugby — but for all its beauty, I doubt it could surpass the loveliness of Ireland.
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