This morning I mopped up the final 10k of the Newry Canal Way from Newry to Pointzpass, then it was up to Scarva and a 25k trek west to Armagh. The Canal path had the usual quotient of dog walkers, earnest sweaty couch to 10k iPod joggers, and bobble hatted fat blokes out for a shuffle and a fag. I did help a young mother manhandle her child’s buggy around a gate. The gate was perfectly typical in terms of normal opening size, the buggy however had the dimensions and somewhat the appearance of a three wheeled all-terrain lunar rover. The child was cocooned in a perspex carrier suspended like a ship’s compass in a giant storm compensating gimbal that cancelled out all the heaving and jolting required to negotiate the gate – I suspect the kid didn’t even register it was outside, quite possibly it might think its still in its womb.
The walk west across Armagh is with only a few exceptions a route along tarmac roads, generally quiet but occasionally big and buzy. This is a pity because this is a very lovely county. This loveliness might make my choice to stop for lunch atop a pile of quarry gravel at a road junction seem a bit odd, but long-distance solo walkers will understand the self-imposed tyranny of “I’ll stop for lunch 20 minutes from….NOW” or “I’ll eat my Mars bar the next time I see a spotty cow”. I only mention this because I was mid-sandwich on my gravel throne when the Armagh Tourism Development Officer pulled up in her car beside me. She was checking on signage for the walk and was exceptionally pleased to actually discover a walker, she took my photo, canvassed my opinion on accommodation and route choice, offered me a lift (?) and wished me well. Sara McGeary, I liked her, she was enthusiastic about her job.
The nicest part of the walk is the couple of kilometres though Clare Glen. I wonder if I am the only person who has on first look misunderstood Armagh Council’s warning signs about fly-tipping? I first saw one of these signs at the entrance to the Glen path but it wasn’t until much later in the afternoon when I saw the same sign on the river walk into Armagh that I realised the sign graphic is meant to depict a CCTV camera above a warning against fly-tipping. This of course makes more sense, why would the Council put up a notice showing a toilet roll holder and warn against dumping? There are public lavatories in the car park and I’m proud to report that I neither fly-tipped nor dumped.
I include a couple of photos taken in the glen, the river rapids are very pretty but Kat Scott has spoilt all such scenes for me because now when I see any fast flowing water I hear her voice in my head saying “I could run that in an open boat, easy”. Now any waterfall photo that doesn’t include a semi-submerged canoe carrying a screaming but grinning young woman is somehow incomplete.
There are any number of cattle, sheep and for reasons I don’t understand donkeys in fields along the route. More unusually I came across a small herd of what urban students of my colleague John Binns would call “big bastard sheep”. Vet friends of mine tell me they are most like camels i.e. curious, indignant, short tempered and spitty, they also tell me that if they get sick or injured they’ll probably die because I have just communicated everything that UK vets know about llamas.
I’m in an Armagh B&B for the next couple of nights leaving Fern at home with a limp, a dog, 30 kilos of apples to be turned into jam or tarts, a mal-functioning printer and a broken boiler – I’m getting off very lightly if I only have to cope with shin splints and the occasional blister.
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