An Irishwoman’s Diary on women with altitude

When Mark Twain visited Switzerland with his family, he decided to hitch a lift on a glacier. His indispensable Baedeker, the 19th-century equivalent of a Lonely Planet guide or travel app, advised that the middle part of the formation was the quickest.

“I waited and waited, but the glacier did not move,” Twain wrote. “Night was coming on, the darkness began to gather – still we did not budge.”

He consulted Baedeker again, and "seldom felt so outraged" to read that this Gorner glacier travelled at little less than an inch a day. By his calculations, that "lightning-express part" on which he was standing was not due in Zermatt, just over three miles distant, until the summer of 2378. As "a means of passenger transportation," he wrote, "I consider the glacier a failure."

We'd been tramping up the glacial deposits that forged Máméan, the "bird's gap", when Trish Walsh whipped Robert McFarlane's Mountains of the Mind out of her knapsack to read Twain's wry observations. A half-hour before, sheltering from a shower at Tobar Pháraic or Patrick's well, she had shared another piece of literature on the popularity of faction fights.

Centuries after the patron saint slept out under the stars at Maméan and blessed the landscape dividing Joyce country from Connemara, commemorative hikes became an outlet for a good old Sunday scrap. Travel writer HD Inglis joined one such “pattern” in 1834, Walsh told us, and he noted that everyone seemed to be called Joyce, though this was “not admitted by the Connemara boys”. Therefore two factions armed with shillelaghs invariably descended into a “scrimmage” .

As Inglis noted, the women back then “took no part ” in the clash of clubs. Also, the lightweight ski poles carried by several participants on this fourth annual Women with Altitude weekend wouldn’t have had quite the same impact, even if same participants would have been fit enough to give a Joyce or two a good run, climb or scramble for their pattern money.

Up to 130 women, including several visitors from Italy, France and Britain, had signed up for the event in Leenane, Co Galway, run by Mountaineering Ireland (MI) with Donegal’s Gartan Outdoor Education Centre. MI president Ursula MacPherson admits she was a little sceptical about the concept when the first such meet was held in 2011, but was aware that some very skilled female participants were still tending to “second” rather than lead up a rock route, or fall in behind a male leader on a mountain walk.

So a programme was drawn up each year to match the particular upland environment – the Mournes, Donegal, Wicklow and then Galway. Workshops were devised, ranging from basic navigation to yoga to nutrition to multi-pitch climbing and scrambling and even “de-scrambling” , as in undoing bad habits acquired over years. Highly accomplished climbers including Clare Sheridan and Orla Prendergast were among keynote speakers, while this year it was the renowned Louise Thomas Turner, a “mum, mountaineer, teacher” and international guide.

Walsh’s Sunday morning geological walk was the mindful part of the programme. And so we began, 500 million years ago, with the formation of Dalradian schists and quartzite all around us. The glacial deposits are relatively young, around 10,000 years back and peat underfoot formed towards the end of the Bronze Age, our latter-day Praeger told us, as she described how the Maumturks and bens beyond were once as high as the Himalaya.

There are advantages to this gentle pacing, at a time when the public fever is for higher, longer, faster. For a climber, that lichen on rock is not only evidence of clear air, but also of an undisturbed habitat, fellow guide Orla Prendergast noted. For safety reasons, it pays to know one’s Dalradian schists from nearby Silurian and carboniferous rocks.

Joe Keane’s bar at Maam was in sight, prompting thoughts of toasted sandwiches by a roaring fire. The sun had enveloped the Failmore river valley before us. But there was one more pause – a short trek with a farmer’s permission up a muddy field and there, before a knoll, was a most spectacular sight; several large boulders comprising folded or metamorphosed layers of rock, known as Lakes Marble.

Comprising calcite, quartz, schist and marble, it is part of the Dalradian “super group” , and is a geologist’s mecca, Walsh remarked. As a detour, it was hard to beat. Why even Twain would have been impressed.

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