The Blue Lough

A walk into the Mourne Mountains this morning brought home how bad last month's fires had been.
I'd seen the huge areas of scorch damage a few weeks ago when walking along the Brandy Pad, but this morning's walk past Annalong Wood was through some of the worst damage.
Much of the wood is now charcoal, large open spaces giving a clear view over to the other side where there used to be a curtain of forest.
Some of it has survived but the rest will have to be replanted, hopefully with native species this time rather than ubiquitous pines.
Further on up large tracts of scrubland are blackened and the recent heavy rains seem to have washed away the charred heather and even the topsoil in which it grew to expose the rocky ground beneath.
Even though I walk this route more than any other in the Mournes the landscape was a new one to me, the surrounding peaks were the same but the ground around them had physically changed.
The silence was more intense than ever, no crickets or bird song, just a couple of cawking ravens on the slopes of Slieve Binnian.
I went on up past a little mountain called Perscy Bysshe, past a cluster of bog cotton in one of the pockets of undamage heather and sat on the shore of the Blue Lough, pictured above.
On the opposite shore were the steeply inclining slabs of Slievelamagan but even up here there was evidence of scorch damage... and then among the charred soil I saw a couple of green shoots.
It might take a few years but the mountains will recover, despite the crisp packet-dropping, boot-eroding (my own included) and cigarette butt-incinerating efforts of those who come here.
Another encouraging thing was a small stunted tree that I always look out for along the path leading to Percy Bysshe was still there. I didn't see it on the way up, but its well off the path and hard to sight sometimes, camoflaged agains the surrounding heather.
But coming down again I saw that it was still there, like the only stage prop in Waiting For Godot, standing stunted but surviving in the fire-blasted mountain heather surrounding it.

The Doan

The Doan (bottom left) is an ugly little runt of a mountain set in the heart of the Mournes, diminutive among the towering slopes that surround it. Many of the best known and most frequently climbed peaks are rounded with man-made cairns on their summits making them appear almost breast-like. Little wonder the mishapen Doan (the name is a bastardisation of the Irish word for 'dun' meaning fort) attracts little attention from many of the usual walkers in the Mournes whose sole purpose seems to be conquer and 'to do' ('I did Donard today'). The Doan is just not sexy enough, and the boggy, undulating ground that you have to trek to get to get to it, after a fairly strenuous climb into the heart of the mountains, makes it even less appealing.
Yet it is this isolation that makes the Doan so appealing for me. While some slopes in the Mournes, Donard in particular, can become congested on a good day, I have only ever met one person treking to the Doan and that was while I was coming away from it.
It took me two hours to climb there today and I spent an hour just sitting there and relishing the silence and the full panorama of the Mournes all around me. Slieve Donard and Comedagh, to their left the craggy summit of Bernagh and then the twins of Meelmore and Meelbeg (top left) - although contrary to what the Irish names suggest Meelbeg (little mountain) is actually bigger - by a few metres - than Meelmore (big mountain).
Below me was Lough Shannagh, Carn Mountain and Slieve Muck, further south I could see the made-made Silent Valley Reservoir and beyond it the mountains fell away to a flat pensinsula that opened on to Carlingford Lough and on the opposite shore the Cooley Mountains in Co Louth. Then turning again were some of the finest and most spectacular peaks in the Mournes - Slieve Binnian and Slieve Lamagan and between them, in the distance, lies the Irish Sea.
There were no sounds except for a few circling ravens, a couple of tricking rivulettes and the wind. Don't go there. You wouldn't like it. Do Donard instead, its far more exiciting.