This is up the way up the mountain, the name Sliabh Liag, which means mountain of stone pillars. Seems appropriate. We were given the option of walking or driving. Driving cost a few bucks, but it was worth it. It’s a single track up the mountain, and right over that rise is the Atlantic, and some of the most dramatic, and the second-highest sea cliffs in Europe.
This is a panorama. If you click the image it’ll open in another browser window, and you can see this just a bit bigger, but, still, not quite as impressive as what we saw. This tops out at 1,972 feet.
That’s the view from a place called Bunglass. A place we lingered for quite a long while. It was, as you can tell, worth it.
The writer, librarian, and naturalist Robert Lloyd Praeger wrote about the “One Man’s Path,” which is here at Sliege League. Praeger called it one of the most remarkable walks to be found in Ireland. Thirty years prior, on the other side of the country, he conducted a survey of a small island and added 90 new species to the Irish flora and fauna and five of them were new to science.
If I added a bunch of new species to the books I would never stop thinking about that. I don’t know how he was able to enjoy the rest of his walks, but he was Irish, and he had places like this to see. I wonder if he saw this he thought, I should go to that little rock and see if that’s a different kind of moss. It could be my next new species.
Here’s the beginning of the walk, or the end. We went up just a tiny little way, but only for this view. Apparently it would take several hours to do the whole thing. Who needs that, when you’ve got this?
I’ve been wanting a picture like this — well, sort of like this — for 10 years. Almost got it. Got this close.
I like these stone steps. The rest of these photos are featuring those steps. Someone put them all there, and we don’t think about things like that enough, and so I thought about that on every sturdy step.
Though I don’t think I can photograph them very well.
But if you go up all of those stone steps, almost to the top of this hill, you’ll turn left, and then continue on that long walk, across the ridge line, with ever-more-grand views of the cliffs and the ocean.
Look at how the peat is growing right up to the rock steps, or probably more accurately, how the rock steps were cut into the peat. Someone had to make that decision too, probably. Or they followed a human or animal path. But suppose a foreman was out there, pointing and drawing and cutting a line. You’d like to think they agonized over that. I’d like to think that, anyway, because that’s a thing I’d agonize over. Whoever made that call, though, probably just wanted to get this done so they could get back in for dinner.
I wonder where the stone steps came from. Probably from the hillside through which we drove on the way up here. They must be well considered, at least a bit. You want stones to be flat on two sides, top and bottom. Surely they didn’t want to waste time on stone masonry here. They’re just steps, after all. So where, then, did the cast offs go?
This place figures, of course, into Ireland’s history and folklore. One of the largest Neolithic cemeteries in the Europe is nearby. An island just off this place holds the ruins of an early Celtic Christian monastery. If you walk along the top you can see an early monastic site and some of the ancient beehive huts, where monks sought solitude, spiritual connection, and help kept the craft of the written word alive.
I had no idea this was here. I didn’t plan the trip, or the day, and I had no idea this even existed. But I’m so glad we saw it. Glad we had the chance to linger here for an hour or so.
This is one of those places I’d come back to, specifically here, to linger, to see more, to see the same, and to find out what’s on the other side of that trail.
