Kippure Mountain & Me

Anita left me the car on Monday and the sun was out. Naturally, I headed south into the Wicklow Mountains. (Technically, I stayed in County Dublin some of the time, but you get the idea.)

I wanted to spend some time outside the city, and the harshness of the Wicklow Mountains always attracts me. I’d planned to bike on the Military Road at some point during the week. The weekend was beautiful (as you saw at the Kings of Concrete). But rain was on the way and it was getting too late for a real adventure.

A walk up Kippure Mountain was perfect for my purposes. It was a true mountain peak, over 700 metres, but the service road to the top made it a relatively easy walk. I could see what was blooming at mid-summer, and I could see some awe-inspiring horizons.

When I cleared the pine forests between Kippure Mountain and the outskirts of Dublin, I noticed several cumulonimbus clouds among the mountains. Those thundery rainclouds are rare here, so I was glad that I picked a route that would let me skedaddle back down if necessary.

But I was lucky: the sun smiled on me the whole way up and down. It was even hot for the first one hundred vertical metres or so. The view was a little hazy, so the photos aren’t ideal, but they’re still worth seeing, so I posted them on Flickr for you:

I took a service road to the peak, and made some friends up there.

On the way down, I did a little hiking off-road. I can see why they needed a service road for the television transmitter — heather over peat is not a particularly stable surface.

For past visitors to the Bakker Bugle B&B: Kippure Mountain is near the Sally Gap, just west of the Military Road. Also, do you remember the lake in the Wicklow Mountains with the resort on its shores? I could see the cliffs of Lough Tay from Kippure Mountain.

For future visitors: I think that cycling up to the peak of Kippure Mountain would make a nice break in a day of driving around County Wicklow. Also, I found a great little road for cycling just outside of Dublin, with very few cars and trucks.

2 Comments to “Kippure Mountain & Me”

  1. Dave said...
    11 August 2008

    This has nothing to do with Kippure Mountain-

    Question for you, Will. Since I’ve got Olympic fever, I thought I’d ask the one question that gets me every time this event rolls around. I’m very confused about entry by the countries of the British Isles into various international sporting events. Great Britain enters a team into the Olympics, not the UK. So, I think that England, Wales, and Scotland play as one team. I think that Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland also play as one team in the Olympics. In FIFA Soccer competitions, all of these “countries” enter their own teams. What’s going on?

    Note that this is even weirder considering that Puerto Rico, a territory of the US, has it’s own team in the Olympics. I just don’t get it.

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