Carlow Walking Festival
The Carlow Walking Festival takes place over the last weekend of the month – from 30th September to the 2nd October. There will be a variety of hillwalks and rambles…
Navigation & Skills
Weather Maps Part 4
Last in this short series on weather maps & forecasts. To recap on previous: Air circulates (wind direction) in anticlockwise way around Low areas of pressure and in a clockwise…
Weather Maps Part 3
Have you ever been out on the hills in fairly mild wet, misty conditions to then experience a heavy belt of rain followed shortly by a sudden clearance to clearer,…
Weather Maps Part 2
What gives us our weather are air masses of different natures: warmer, cooler, wetter, dryer, unstable, stable etc and then how these air masses mix together and influence each other.…
Weather Maps Part 1
A recent discussion on weather apps put me in mind of weather maps and how to interpret and make you own weather judgements, based on these charts and your own…
Night Navigation
I was involved in running mountain navigation courses and the like back in the 1980s. It’s where I honed navigation and route finding skills picked up previously in the course…
Litter & Dumping
Some small scale littering/ dumping in a local wood near us. I find it hard to understand why people still think it’s OK to throw a couple of bags of…
Streams & Rivers
The crossing of streams and rivers is arguably the most common objective hazard faced by Irish hill walkers. Often pleasant & good fun to boulder hop in dry conditions, challenging…
Turf Stack Walls
The aerial photo here shows about twenty low walls varying in length from 5 to 10 metres, many with a little right angle return on the southern end. Such walls…
Wild & Wet
The past weekend brought stormy weather with wild winds and soaking rain to many Irish hills. This photo here is courtesy of Ambrose in Hike & Climb.ie, who was instructing…