Ireland Diaries: Up, up and away
Devils, northerners and dodgy political metaphors on Ireland's highest mountain
The thing about climbing a mountain is it’s hard to know whether you’ll enjoy it until you’re halfway up, and by then it doesn’t matter if you’re enjoying it anyway because you’re up there, climbing it, and you might as well get to the top and then try to come back down again.
At first climbing is just walking, regular walking that is, on reasonably flat ground. But then all of a sudden this big thing is rearing up in front of you and your task - your chosen task for the day, you have chosen to be here - is to get to the top of it. And then, and here’s the real kicker, you have to get yourself back down again.
At the bottom of Carrauntoohil, the highest mountain in Ireland, they make it very clear to you that you may not enjoy climbing it. After all, plenty of others didn’t. Next to the path to the mountain there is a wall containing quite a few memorials to those who have died while on the mountain. One memorial would be too many, but this wall looks like the site of a double-decker bus crash.
I had thought, when we booked a guide for the trek to the top, that we were being overly cautious. Now it just seems like we’re making sure we don’t come back down in body-bags. If we now do die up there at least there will be a strapping guide to carry our corpses back down. I had visions of being ferried up the mountain by a wise old Irishman, but instead we are to be escorted by a still wise, slightly younger Yorkshireman from Sheffield, about twenty minutes north of where I was born.
“You don’t sound like you’re a northerner,” he tells me quickly, which along with the fact that many people seem to have fallen down dead on the mountain, is the second thing today that I didn’t need to hear.
Like most northerners who have deserted to the south I am aware, if I care to admit it, that my once sharp northern accent has gone a bit soft. According to most northerners that’s not the only thing that will have gone soft. There is also my capacity to weather hard times, my capacity to handle the weather itself, and certainly my ability to withstand the cold. But I prefer to not have this pointed out.
The Yorkshireman further colours our impression of him by stating that, since conditions are unpredictable, we cannot make the summit “our only goal” of the day. This would perhaps be acceptable for regular hill walkers, people who spend most weekends rambling up and down steep places because they enjoy it and because for some reason they don’t like getting blind drunk like the rest of us. But we are here to get all of our mountain climbing well and truly out of our system. This may be the one weekend of our entire lives when we rock up to the bottom of a very big hill and agree to see each other at the top. More to the point, this Yorkshireman has cost us a pretty penny and the least he can do is make sure we see a summit or two.
Besides, conditions are balmy. Or they’re balmy for Ireland in September, which basically means it isn’t raining. There can be no guarantees that at some point today it won’t rain - again, this is Ireland in September - but right now, it isn’t.
So, how do you climb Carrauntoohil? Well, you walk to the bottom of it, and then heave your way up the devil’s ladder. Two words you really don’t need to hear when out walking are “devil’s” and “ladder”. Put them together and it’s enough to make you pack up and go home. Anything that’s property of the devil can steer well clear of me, thank you very much, and a ladder is the last thing of his I need, given its vertical connotations.
The devil’s ladder in reality looks worse from afar than up-close, but that’s giving it the only possible compliment I can. From afar it looks like a landslide. From up close it still looks like a landslide but one that at least has something with a passing resemblance to a path. We don’t walk up it so much as scramble, and at one point I have the ignominy of being helped over a particularly tricky bit by my northern nemesis, the guide. This is a low point, though only figuratively, since I’m about 300 metres up the side of the mountain at the time.
We make it to the top of the devil’s ladder! Hooray! But we have not yet climbed the mountain. Boooo. We are but two thirds of the way there and still have the shoulder to climb. The shoulder, according to the pesky northerner, is the most moral-sapping part of the climb. The ladder is steep but fast, it’s very unpleasant but over quickly, like waxing a back.
The shoulder is a long old slog, another forty five minutes to the top. It’s plucking your eyebrows and, for good measure, the inside of your nostrils. Just when you think you’re done you find another little blighter, another crest to summit.
But after a lot of trudging and panting we do indeed make it to the top. We are rewarded with splendid views of bucolic Ireland, and a freezing gale. Really freezing. It was warm - or warmish, again, Ireland in September - at the bottom of the mountain, in the valley, but now it’s literally blowing a gale and not bringing gloves feels like a very silly idea.
We spend a long time up there with our northern nemesis learning about the landscape and losing the feeling in our extremities. It’s only when we’re preparing to go back down that I realise something: we’re about to go back down. We have to spend the rest of our time that day getting back off this thing we have spent all the time in the day so far getting up. The thing that they don’t tell you about climbing a mountain - but that should be obvious - is that the day doesn’t end, crescendo, with the triumphant reaching of the summit. That happens bang in the middle, really just past lunch.
Standing at the top of Carrauntoohil we are Emmanuel Macron, David Cameron. We have reached the top far, far too early and now all we have to look forward to is the long, slow decline. We must go back down again.
Still, at least we’re not dead.
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Memorials on a mountain you’re about to climb is never a good sign! Funnily enough I’m currently listening to a BBC Sounds podcast about mountaineers coming a cropper on K2 - seems this week’s theme is living vicariously through other people’s risk-taking.
Stunning photography, Tom!