June 30, 1990: Tinahely to Shillelagh
Looking back to Tinahely
It was not raining when we got up on the morning of Saturday, June 30th. This gave us time to wander about a bit, even before breakfast. (Elizabeth let our waitress, who had forgotten her key, into the hotel.) I took some pictures from the town square of this not particularly attractive village. From some windows World Cup tricolors were hanging hopefully. We also visited the shops for more snacks; I bought a paper (against the next boot stuffing necessity) and some apples.
Sandwiches were handed to us as we finished our breakfast; we were now almost alone in the hotel’s dining room. Here Gavan noticed some raindrops now falling in the back garden – but these passed for the time being. He and I each bought a small replica of a Wicklow Way direction post, yellow arrow and all. Because we had only ten miles to go today, almost a rest day by our standards, we dawdled a bit in Tinahely and did not leave the hotel until 10:30.
We left town as we had entered it, though without the moisture falling down on our heads. A woman was trying to lead two horses along the road from one field to the next, but one of these, a very new colt, kept wandering away from mum and proved to be quite a menace to the traffic. A car started to follow this caravan, its driver waving his arm to warm drivers behind him of the menace ahead. We did not have much more of the highway to master after we had passed the horses and we weren’t required to walk all the way back to our bridge – as the Wicklow Way continues up a tarmac lane on the Tinahely side of the pass.
We passed several cottages before turning south to follow a boreen along the flanks of Glenphilipeen. There were views of the plains of Carlow on our right again as we walked above a series of farmsteads on a green track occasionally hemmed in by stone walls. There were a number of tricky gate crossings and a few questions as to which track to take but we seemed to be all right as long as we maintained our elevation.
Heading away from Tinahely on a typical boreen
After an hour or so the boreen came to an end and we followed a straight forest road out to tarmac. Here we were supposed to turn southeast, but there was no marker. Malone says this is often hidden – but our searches in the undergrowth and behind log piles produced no evidence of its whereabouts; indeed, we were about to begin a long section with no waymarks at all, one that would have been impossible to negotiate without Malone’s book.
We decided to turn left on the tarmac and our position on the Way was soon confirmed by a lady whose dog had emerged from her yard to challenge our progress. Just as we got to our next junction the rain began again; it would accompany us without letup for the rest of the day’s walk! We turned right and entered Mulinacuff village. Gavan had convinced himself that there would be a pub here but there seemed to be no amenities of any sort, just scattered houses in a little bit of suburbia plunked down amid the forests and the moorland.
We turned left and walked out of the village. I could see two dogs heading our way but they veered off with their master, whose cottage was by the side of the road. “Not a nice day for your work,” he said to us. We reached what we hoped was the Stranakelly Crossroads but we were still without any direction posts and Gavan went into the farm on the corner to have them confirm our position. We were now required to climb around the shoulders of a very steep hill, Cronelea, still using tarmac. Meanwhile the rain had started to fall in ever greater intensity. It was really quite miserable – as bad as I could remember it – and to add to our discomfort we now had lightning and thunder as well. After we had plodded along our road for some time Elizabeth spotted an open barn with a corrugated iron roof and a concrete floor just on our right – and we took shelter here for some lunch.
There was no place to sit down on the manure-flecked floor so we ate our dry sandwiches standing up. I ate an apple and drank some water as well. At least we got our packs off for a few minutes, my camera having long ago found a home in the recesses of Gavan’s pack. He was counting the intervals between the lightning flashes and the thunder claps to see how far away the bolts were from our refuge. At least the fireworks had ended by the time we were ready to put our heads back into the rain again.
I could see that the troops, particularly Elizabeth, were quite miserable and in order to cheer us up a bit I decided to tell them a story as we walked along – remembering how my stepfather, Ingolf Dahl, over forty years ago, used to do this whenever our hiking parties were feeling sorry for ourselves. I chose to tell them the story of how Dorothy and I arrived in London in 1981 and what we did when we had settled here. This seemed to amuse them considerably and there were many questions as we sloshed along the road, completing at last the circuit of Cronelea Hill.
Our road, as we approached the Kilquiggin crossroads, was a river of rusty brown water. We walked along the edge a bit, then took a shortcut around the slated house on the corner in order to avoid deeper pools on the tarmac. Geese were sitting placidly in the yard of this house as we turned left on the higher road, passing the church, and continuing south. There was a tempting Shillelagh turnoff we had to ignore – in order to get a little closer to this village before abandoning the Way. It was hard to tell how much farther we had to go since Malone reported the distance from the Way to the town as two, three, or three and half kilometers – depending on which page you happened to be reading!
The rain continued to fall as we made our way down a steep hill, joining the Tullow-Shillelagh road and continuing eastwards. I kept up my narrative throughout this wet march, pausing only occasionally to answer a question or to marvel over the brown river that was flooding the nearby fields. There was a lot of splashing traffic on this road and this did not make things any easier for us. Still we persevered, and entered our village at about 4:00. There seemed to be a huge meadow that separated one street from the rest of the action; we followed the curve of the road around this greensward, passing beneath the church and beyond a pub (“the in Inn”) and continuing down the main drag. Here we spotted the Avalon Hotel.
I pose in front of the Avalon Hotel, Shillelagh
A pretty chubby blonde girl, working at the bar, welcomed us and gave us the keys to our rooms on the first floor. Again we threw off our wet clothes as soon as possible; although the rooms were pretty seedy, with odd pieces of carpet covering the floors and no heat in the radiators – but at least we had our own toilets and showers. Gavan was soon complaining that the water pressure “sucked.” (“Suck” being the most commonly used verb in the language of the American School in London student body in 1990 – as “awesome” and “unlucky,” antonyms, were the most commonly used adjectives.)
When we went downstairs to discuss evening meal plans I asked our barmaid if there was any place in the hotel where we might dry off some of our thoroughly soaked clothes. She made inquiries and asked us to hand over our things, taking them to the kitchen for an overnight stay. We had some drinks in the bar and I used the call box across the street to phone Dorothy. The male operator very kindly called me back before our conversation began so that he could get rid of the pips. By this time, 6:00 or so, it was sunny again, and we wandered back up the main street to do some snack shopping in the local market. Across the street there was a donkey eating grass in the meadow.
We were the only guests in the chilly dining room. Gavan found a space heater and turned it on. The meal was not particularly memorable; we did have fresh fruit and cream for dessert. By the time we were finished the World Cup match between Ireland and Italy, a quarter final, had begun, and we had some drinks while sitting in a leather banquette while watching this. As it became evident that Italy would win 1-0 Gavan became quite glum, but he brightened up a bit as we got into our beds for an hour of chatter.
To continue with the next stage of our walk you need: