Walk for the weekend: Climb the ’stairs and get a taste for heights

When we were very young kids, dad used bring us to Mount Leinster and the Comeraghs – long day trips from Wexford in our old Morris Minor.

I remember well his stories of the Comeraghs, the deep lakes with peaty yellowed trout, the inaccessible cave of a notorious mountain bandit, high cliffs and eerie, misty pinnacles. The bits about glaciers and “pudding-stones” (conglomerates whose embedded pebbles were eroded off ancient mountains) excited but overwhelmed my young imagination.

So, in terms of creating memories, Mount Leinster had real competition those days. Its summit did, however, afford me my first special experience of being up high, so high that I seemed to see everywhere – my first serious mountain vista. I remember my dad with an old half-inch sheet 19, pointing out places to us, some really exotic and exciting, like the mystical Saltee Islands.

The Blackstairs Mountains represent the southern extremity of the great granite intrusion that extends from Dublin city well down into Co Wexford. While its Wicklow section was sculpted by local ice-caps, mountain and valley glaciers, the Blackstairs got off relatively lightly, though perhaps with periodic submergence under a regional ice-cap.

I decided to revisit Mount Leinster on a blustery day in July. There are many beautiful approaches radiating out from the mountain; but that day, I took the turf-cutters path, in the upper Urrin River valley, a route that provides easy access up to the long ridge between Mount Leinster and Black Rock Mountain.

An intrusive stone-built turf cutters’ shelter sits on the low point between these tops. Its saving grace, however, is the comfort it provides to admire the Wicklow uplands away to the north, and the beautifully undulating patchwork of landscape in between.

I pressed on, deciding to delay complete visual gratification until the summit, though sneaking the odd look at the lovely sinuous curves of the mountains to the south. The path is clear and well-trodden all the way, though it gets a bit lost among peat hags and boulder fields near the summit.

For me, the views to the east and south were the glory of the day. Virtually all of county Wexford, down to a sunlit Celtic Sea, was laid out before me. To the south-west, however, shower curtains hid the Comeraghs and Galtees, allowing me only views of graceful Slievenamon. In the midst of my reverie, one of those squalls sneaked up behind me, sending me scurrying down the path.

I picked up the path that loops around towards Ballycrystal, and walked the long, quiet lane back to my car. As I went, the well-tended road margins and gardens of the local people spoke to me of their pride in that beautiful little corner of Co Wexford, under Mount Leinster.

MOUNT LEINSTER, BLACKSTAIRS, CO WEXFORD
Map: OSI Discovery Series sheet 68.
Start/finish: forestry access track, 1km east of Boladurragh on the R746.
Effort: about 14km, 600m of climbing.
Time: 4 hours.
Suitability: moderate fitness; navigation skills needed.