Summers Past: Fintan O’Toole, his father and son walk the Wicklow Way, 1990

In the first of a series where we mine the Irish Times archive to find the best articles from previous summers, Fintan O’Toole walks the Wicklow Way in the company of his then 60-year-old father and four-year-old son. The series ran over four days in August 1990, and is reproduced here in an edited form.

Day One

Like most pleasures, walking is at its best when it is most pointless. Walking to the shops is a pain, walking to the chipper is a dreadful imposition. A bus strike which means that you have to walk for 40 minutes to work is a national scandal. But somehow, walking all day for no reason at all is the height of luxury. It measures out the distance we have collectively travelled: a few generations ago, a day’s walk to get where you had to go was one of the great hardships of life.

And so, here we are on the 48A bus on a sunny Monday morning, heading out towards Marlay Park where the Wicklow Way starts, my father, my son and myself. The Da is 60, a full-time birdwatcher and a fit man. Samuel is four, a full-time Children’s Channel-watcher who will walk across the road to the shops only with threats behind him and the promise of an ice-cream before him.

The immediate task is to get Samuel through Marlay Park without him remembering the existence of the playground. This is accomplished with much swagger, swinging of arms and Hitler Youth-style ruggedness and we get without incident out of the park. We have done three kilometres out of 80.

We have been following the yellow markers for the Way with no difficulty and using J. B. Malone’s “The Complete Wicklow Way” for re-assurance. J. B. Malone planned out the Way, so if he doesn’t know where we’re meant to be going, then no one will. As we get to the television mast on Three Rock Mountain, though, we hit a crisis of confidence.

The markers have either been vandalised or were never there. The guide is utterly vague and the detailed diagrams in it don’t even show the TV mast which would seem like the most obvious of landmarks. There are paths going in every direction and we take one of the many wrong ones.

We depend on the kindness of strangers and are put on the right path, but we have begun to doubt all the publicity about the Way being planned with the uninitiated, as well as the experienced walker, in mind.

Two deer, a doe and her fawn, show themselves on the path as we move into Tibradden Forest, but Samuel misses them, because moved by the lyrical spirit of the scene, he has begun to play an ancient Gaelic game called Throwing Pine Cones At Your Father. He had been getting a bit bored, but the sight of pine cones by the handful and an idea of what they might do to my already reddening neck cheers him up no end.

The game gets us through this forest and the next one in Glencullen, with the opportunity for a bit of unrestricted sadism giving him a burst of energy of the kind that only large doses of Artificial Colourings and Flavourings have been known to accomplish before.

The city now seems very far away, and the TV mast on the top of Kippure seems, as you walk in its shadow, as bare and primitive as any natural object. It hits you that you really are out on your own now, that there are no shops, no pubs alone the way, that this is a big, wide open place with very little mark of humanity in it. The holes in your stomach start to gape and groan, the phantom taste of foam on the top of a pint fills your mouth, you start to mentally settle down for the night.

Day Two

“One boy. Boy for sale” we are singing as we cross the Heather Desert, but the sheep aren’t interested and the muted irony is lost on Samuel’s innocent sensibilities. We were keeping “Oliver” as an emergency device in case of panic on Samuel’s part, since singing the entire musical from start to finish is one of the few known ways of keeping him amused. But it has been the kind of morning where last resorts have been resorted to first.

We cheer up after a pleasant walk along a forest park, but then we come down onto a tarmac road from which there are three possible directions to go and no markings. We know that we have to cross the Glencree River, so we make our way through fields of ferns down into a valley and ford the stream, but there is still no sign of the yellow arrows we have come to accept as signs from God. If there were no Way at all, we would just follow the compass and our instincts and probably be happy enough. But because it’s there and we’re not on it, we begin to feel like lost souls in the exterior darkness.

Then, as we rise towards Djouce Mountain, so do our spirits. With Maulin behind us, the Ride Rock to the left and Djouce ahead of us across Glensoulan and the sparking Dargle, the sun and the yellow arrows of the markers are shining out on something very beautiful. Besides, Oliver has just met the Artful Dodger and there is dancing in the streets. A signpost tells us that we have come 30 kilometres from Marlay, which is a cheerfully round number.

And then, just in front of us on the path, a young cuckoo, blue-grey with a majestic, hawk-like tail, is being fed green and yellow caterpillars by a pair of meadow pippets. It is rare to see a cuckoo so close, rarer still that it stays just ahead of us for a good 10 minutes, blithely unconcerned about our presence. Its nonchalance brings home the fact that we are on its territory, that people are not familiar enough here to be frightening. There is nothing “natural” about this - Glensoulan was once full of people, their houses and their village - but it does give you a feeling of quiet privilege.

Quiet, that is, until Samuel begins to bawl: “It’s not a cuckoo, it’s not a cuckoo.” Why is it not a cuckoo, Samuel? “Because it’s not yellow and it doesn’t have a clock.” It is a reasonable enough point and when we accept it meekly, he is pacified and begins to stride heroically up Djouce, chatting in a matter-of-fact way to the sheep and the caterpillars. From here on in to Roundwood he is terrific.

There are 2½ kilometres of ordinary road into Roundwood and the sign for the village is almost as beautiful to behold as the mountains and lakes we passed earlier. It is after eight as we push through the doors of The Roundwood Inn for a meal and a drink and they are decidedly snooty about letting Samuel into the restaurant. After his heroics of the last few hours (as well as the walking, he has just shot Bill Sykes), I am ready to defend him to the death, and there follows a short snootiness contest which we win. We are grudgingly allowed to order enormous amounts of food and drink. I hobble to the phone to ring Mrs Malone, whose B&B a mile up the road we are to stay in, just to tell her that we are on the way. She offers to send someone down in a car to collect us. In more ways than one, I am ready to fall at her feet.

Day Three

It is a good job that the Irish B&B breakfast, one of the great cultural achievements of our people, doesn’t need planning permission. If it did, there would be serious trouble, for it has under gone several unauthorised extensions, higgledy-piggledy outhouses and a few ribbon developments. Faced with two alternative kinds of breakfast - the Irish one of rashers, eggs, sausages and pudding, and the Continental one of muesli, fruit and coffee - B&B landladies, in their infinite generosity, have merely added the two together. As the years go on and fashions change, the B&B breakfast simply grows and grows.

This is our easy day. All we have before us is 10 kilometres to Glendalough, and, by now we sneer at that as a mere skip across the road. We have the time. We have the food. We sure as hell have the appetite. We eat for a solid hour.

We find the Way again easily and stroll through the flood-tide of light that engulfs us as we pass along a country road that is as beautiful as any mountain track , with the trees forming ceremonial arches overhead and young pheasants gangly and half-naked, running around in the fields and ditches.

The problem comes when we have to turn off the road and start climbing over Paddock Hill, the one real bit of steep walking we expect to encounter today. There have been no yellow markers for a while and we know we have to turn up right off the road at a field with a big stone in it and a boreen running up at its side. We come to just such a field, but there is no marker indicating a turn. We sit in the field for a long time in a kind of limbo.

Out here, when you’ve nothing else to think about all day, such dilemmas take on a great moral complexity. After a low-flying reconnaissance mission by the Da fails to spot a marker up ahead, we take our fate in all six feet and march up the hill.

We start to see markers again. It turns out that if we had trusted the system, we would have turned off the road shortly after we did at a spot that presumably is well marked. We decide to trust more to blind faith and to stop being so smart and it works well for the rest of the day. God strews the arrows in our path like rose petals at a Corpus Christi procession.

Before I know where I am, one thing leads to another and I am telling Samuel about all the things I always swore I would never burden his young imagination with: the Devil, Hell, the torments of fire. He enjoys it enormously but I am deeply ashamed of myself.

I realise that I am regressing fast out here. Since Samuel is growing up rapidly, we are both reaching a point where we will have the same mental age, somewhere around 10. It is partly the result of conversing on his level all day, partly some kind of atavistic state into which the performance of nothing other than basic physical tasks all day makes you lapse.

Before we know it, we are in Laragh and we stop for a huge ice-cream cone at the first shop we have passed in three days. There is less than a mile into Glendalough and it seems, after our days of quiet, like the Big Smoke.

After a few pints and a Big Dinner, I slip upstairs and, on the pretence of putting Samuel, who is as fresh as a daisy, to bed, crawl in beside him. I fall immediately into an innocent, total, untroubled child’s sleep, the kind I haven’t had since my First Communion got me worried about things. It is half past eight and down below the evening drinkers are arriving for their first few sips.

Day Four

We have, for the first time, managed to get on the road at a respectable hour (nine o’clock), feeling newly born after last night’s coma and knowing that today is the real test: 30 kilometres into Aughavannagh, the highest climb of the whole Way at Mullaghmore (sometimes called Mullacor) Mountain, and grouchy swirls of grey clouds, the first real threat of serious rain we have had in the four days, already brooding around Derrybawn.

Here I am hauling Samuel up the climb towards Mullaghmore, labouring but undaunted. The one great advantage of having bursting lungs, popping eyes and a heart that is making noises like Buddy Rich on speed, is that you can neither talk nor sing, so at least my vocal cords are getting some badly needed R&R. Samuel is getting a bit piqued at this since he now wants to sing “My Fair Lady”, having finally tired of “Oliver”. He keeps starting, “Just you wait, ‘Enry ‘Iggins” but can’t think of any more lines, and, even if I could talk, neither could I.

Suddenly, the Da breaks into a complete, word-perfect rendition. Samuel is so stunned that he gets down from my shoulders and looks at his grandfather with the kind of adoring awe that the Kung Fu initiate reserves for his master and teacher.

The path to Mullaghmore summit is hard I going and the rain now is real rain, not just the kind of liquefied sunshine we have had before. The summit is wonderful, with views on all four sides as if you were looking down on the country from a flying saucer. Even with the rain, the views are still starkly grand, the patches of mist adding to the cold mystery of the hills.

Another kind of mystery, though, descends as soon as you start to think about making your way down from the summit. There are no markers and the guide book is no help. Visibility is getting bad, the wind is howling, and we start to make our way back the way we have came, neither of us admitting that we are turning back, both of us (Samuel merely keeps asking “Are we lost?”) knowing that we are.

The feeling that the markers have some kind of supernatural status is reinforced by the fact that, as soon as we find a marker, the rain stops and the wind dies down and the sun comes out. Far from seeming like a chore now, the rest of the Way seems like a bonus, something we had resigned ourselves to not having.

We hit a pleasant sign of the hand of mankind: a large, round plastic Guinness sign. We have come down onto the floor of the valley and are looking at the other side which we have to climb and which looks as sheer as a factory full of Pretty Pollies. I glance to the left and there it is in all its siren splendour. We slink into a lovely old pub, the first the Way has passed for four days. It is womb-like and as dark as the pints that are settling before we hit our seats. What follows, because it is so unexpected, so shamelessly stolen, is the high pint of my life. It goes down like the Glenmalure cascade in winter. We reach the bottom of our glasses, look at each other in silence, and remount our knapsacks. It is a far, far braver thing we have done than we have ever done before, an act of courage unrivalled since the days of Sparta.

Samuel is tired by now, but after a hard climb, most of the way to Aughavannagh is downhill. We know now that we will make it, and that we can draw a few conclusions.

We have shown that at least the first four days of the Wicklow Way (it is seven days in all, ending up in Clonegal, Co Carlow) can be done even with little kids, provided, (a) you are sensible about having the right basic equipment and keeping an eye on the weather; (b) you have at least two adults just in case; (c) you are prepared to do a bit of carrying (Samuel has walked in all about three-quarters of the Way); and (d) you have a large store of songs from 1960s musicals.

We limp, slinge and otherwise meander towards the youth hostel. We slump on a seat in front of the hostel, waiting to be collected. When we are, I will note that it takes almost exactly an hour to get from Aughavannagh to the entrance of Marlay Park, the distance it has taken us four days to do.

I am just unwrapping my boots when Samuel spots a football on the green in front of us. “You be Dave O’Leary,” he orders, but I insist on being Packie Bonner instead. At this stage, I could make a habit of standing still and, from time to time, falling on the ground as the ball whistles past.

This is an edited version of the series that originally appeared in August 1990. To read the full articles as they originally appeared, visit: Day One, Day Two, Day Three, Day Four.