There are days when a benign forecast irresistibly calls hikers on to the high summits of our beautiful uplands; and there are other days when a warm fire and good company are “yer only man”! And then there are the more common in-between days when a more subtle call will still well reward donning the boots.
One of those in-between days found me in Wexford on a December day of northward-flying low cloud, occasional mist and an acceptable 12 degrees. I’d come to walk the very atmospheric Raven Point loop just north of Wexford town. This is a waymarked trail of about 9km on easy terrain of “forest tracks, dune trails and beach” – as the information panel in the car park trail head near Curracloe says.
Wexford is famous for its fine beaches. The sea has had its wicked way with the “soft” glacial debris of its east coast over countless cycles of erosion and deposition, winnowing out fine marine and glacial sands.
South of Wexford town, however, hard but beautiful Carnesore granite has resisted the angriest of seas for millennia, preserving the dramatically abrupt southeast “corner” of Ireland, so familiar to us on the map of our island.
The Raven Point is a sand spit, a depositional zone where sand strains mostly southward, creating sand banks and silting issues in the wide Slaney estuary. Its dune system was largely stabilised in the 1950s by the planting of a variety of pines, probably inspired by the great Landes pine forest of the French coast south of Bordeaux, and has been anchored on its west side by the draining of the North Slob.
Its isolation and the inaccessibility of parts of the slob and the sand banks off its southern tip have attracted and/or maintained a wonderful variety of migratory and local birds, again see the very informative panels.
For me that day my sense of the first four kilometres out to the actual point was mostly of the sounds around me: the soughing south wind in the winter trees and a distant sea-sound from somewhere away to my left, over a dune system strewn with pine, bramble and marram grass.
The sounds subtly merged at times and seemed accentuated by the mist-bounded space I walked in. Out at the point, and as I swung around east out of the forest towards the open sea, I walked as if onto a misty island of diffused shadowless light, sand and marram grass, edged by a pine forest responding stiffly to the wind and a white-tipped sea seeming to me more of sound than sight.
From here the path took me back along a pristine beach, in places strewn with dislodged and burnt trees, testaments to storms and forest fires.
A unique assembly of forest, dunes and beach, vaguely conjuring up visions of a tropical shore, make this a beautiful sheltered low-level and easy walk on any day and in virtually any conditions.
