The Mountains of Mourne - A Celebration of a Place Apart

The Paths

You follow in footsteps as ancient as human life in Ireland when you walk the tracks and paths that vein the Mountains of Mourne.

The trails of scuffed rock and raw peat that climb to the summits are young, the mark of leisured man, but still drawing the walker through the mountain fastness are the lines of the paths that were first etched by the silent feet of hunting man as he forayed through the wooded valleys and passes.

Later these tracks became the routes of easiest travel for the early farmers walking and trading betewwen their stone-circled settlements on the cleared land on either side of the mountain barrier, for inland families to reach the coastal fisheries, and for their cattle to be taken to their summer pastures in the wide upland valleys.

Four thousand years ago prospectors, scouring Ireland for lodes of precious copper and tin for the first Bronze Age smelters, trod the tracks as they explored the seemingly promising granite outcrops of the Mournes. They found none and moved on, but generations later the stone men would widen and surface many of their ancestors’ paths to extract the only wealth the mountains could offer – hard crystal granite for the roads and lintels and stern buildings of industrial Britain.

The hard-booted feet of other stone men, men from the lowland towns who over 18 summers [from 1904] climbed daily to build the 22 miles of massive wall that links the High Mourne summits, trod out different trails that even after three-quarters of a century can still be followed.

Meanwhile through the centuries the layers of peat had been building as the mountains were stripped of their trees. When this peat came in turn to fuel the fires of a growing population other paths were widened to take the carts where wheels could go to the bogs. Where the ground was too rough and steep new deep tracks were carved by the wooden runners of the farmers’ slipes (sleighs) piled with turf.

And interweaving with them all, of course, and draped like a web across all the hills, are the miles of seemingly aimless tracks made by the flocks of foraging sheep since the mountains were given to them 200 years ago. Sheep tracks are not always wise paths to take – sheep have a different agenda.

Take a path and the path takes you. It flows with the energy of those who made it. Today the ancient tracks, some scrambling adventurously round the slopes, others wide and worn and purposeful, thrusting into the valleys, draw in those who walk now for pleasure, seeking the company of rock and stream. Those whose legacy they are, who first passed that way, the herdsmen, the farmers, the tinkers, the herdsmen, the stone men, the peat cutters, have long passed on.

Or might they not still walk with you their ancient ways?

Read more in The Mountains of Mourne – A Celebration of a Place Apart by David Kirk, published by Appletree Press

Some good advice to read before following in David Kirk’s footsteps in the Mournes: mountain walking advice, extracted from Walking Ireland’s Mountains: a guide to the ranges and the best walking routes by David Herman, published by Appletree Press.