If you follow the Tumblr photos in the sidebar of this blog, then you’ve seen a few shots of the snow in Dublin this week. If you’ve visited the Bugle B&B, then you know that there’s a desolate mountain range just south of Dublin. It’s one of my favourite places in Ireland.
It’s still fascinating to this child of the Corn Belt that such an inhospitable area is so close to Dublin, just a few kilometres beyond the suburbs. You can take the urban bus system into the Wicklow Mountains. If you research hillwalking in County Wicklow on the internet, you’ll see plenty of warnings about weather conditions. Those warnings resonated with my wariness of mountainous terrain. And I was not long in Ireland before I saw how quickly a sunny walk along a little trail can turn into a beating administered by a cold, wet wind followed by rain and flooding creeks.
This week, those warnings were completely vindicated, (more…)