City councils finally walking the walk

WALKING in Ireland has found its feet.

RTÉ broadcaster John Murray, with his Walking Club, is doing for the body what fellow jock Ryan Tubridy’s Book Club did for the mind — exercising it. Murray’s ‘walks’ over the summer made for easy listening, local yarns, and harder trekking for those who joined him off-air, and after a few days on the Camino de Santiago (and at the risk of him being the next Donncha O’Dualing) the affable Murray’s walking club is back on the byroad beat come October 2, in Doneraile.

To walk doesn’t mean having to tog out in all-weather gear, donning ankle-protecting boots, carrying a stout stick and watching out for snapping dogs: it’s as healthy, stimulating and productive to do in a town or on an urban street.

Urban walks aren’t new to us: if, and when, we go to foreign cities (aah, remember when?), one of the simple pleasures is/was walking the streets and back lanes, soaking up the atmosphere, getting a bit lost, swatting up on historic buildings (even atheists find time abroad for a church).

Yep, you’ve guessed what’s coming around the corner — home-turf holidays, weekends up the road and back down the road, Ryanair be damned, and basically acting the tourist in our own towns. Or a neighbour’s town, if we’re broadminded. Dublin has its literary walks and tourist trails, but other Irish cities without the same literary/cultural/historical attractions, Galway, Limerick, Cork, Waterford, are a great size to explore on foot, and you’d never know what you’ll recall when getting off the bypasses and ring roads in cities we thought we knew.

A dedicated Cork Walking Month finishes at the end of this week, and by Friday last had inveigled 800 walkers out on a series of short, introductory walks, mixing enthusiasts with novices (there are four more events remaining, see www.corkwalkingmonth.ie). By month’s end, there’ll have been 1,000 out walking, says spokesperson Maurice O’Sullivan — and that’s a healthy increase on last year’s initial event (health? how about the 11,000 who sweated Cork’s four-mile Evening Echo mini-marathon yesterday?) Now, the launch this month of a new, ‘branded’ urban walking route by Cork City Council is an example of how to make the most of what’s under our noses — our streets, built heritage, archaeology, and inhabitants.

Informative street signs have sprung up along the third of a series of four planned routes, all of a high standard, with information and themed routes simply outlined for free, self-guided walks.

You don’t need a pamphlet, an iPhone, or a chatter-box to show you the way.

The latest to hit the ground running is a self-guiding route of Cork city centre, linking 13 ‘easily-digested’ information panels mounted on rugged, stainless steel stands, giving details of nuggets of note, be it a church, bridge, bollard or building’s bow end. It brings in history, sports, and famous and near-forgotten names — Cork’s Rambles, if not quite Barcelona’s Las Ramblas.

The city centre route, just up and strolling since last week, follows the footsteps of walk predecessors over the past two years that include a route up and around Shandon, and another south-side, tripping around the south parish. Each of the trio starts at Daunt’s Square, and heads on a tangential turning loop from there, and ends again handily close-by the starting point. Small, code-coloured ‘walking men’ markers are scattered along the way to nudge the walkers to the next relevant information panel.

The fourth, and so far final one planned, is the UCC-Mardyke area, but work on that one hasn’t started yet, so there’s a bit of mileage left in the notion yet (and, while we’re at it, how about another themed on the city’s bridges, or its ridges? Highest south-side point to highest north-side point for the views?) In fairness to the local authority, its plans for walks along the River Lee’s length are still making tracks — the new Mardyke bridge is an example of joined-up thinking, and we’re close now to being able to do the Lee Fields to Blackrock Castle in a safe amble.

Each of the four routes is reckoned to come in at about a 90-minute amble, but you can quicken the pace, slow it down, add in a loop or distraction, throw your hat at it if it rains, and pick it up another day. Take in a few stops over lunchtime, and add a few more some other day. Several of the three mapped out on the ground so far overlap at various points, so as either a tourist or a local, you can be the right Cork rebel, go off-piste, hit the shops, coffee joints or bars, and rejoin ‘half-piste.’

The stands are up already, just watch out for them, brochures for starters can be had from Cork City Council and the Tourist Office, while pdfs of the three walks completed so far will be downloadable from www.corkcity.ie by the end of this week.