Travel Writer, Wicklow: “I told myself I was prepared to face my fear of being completely alone.”

Since childhood I have nursed dreams of travelling solo around the globe.

However, as a student putting myself through college, and eager to test myself alone in the wilds it was on the Wicklow Way that I first felt the unbounded elation of the gravel track crunching beneath my boots. In its entirety ‘The Way’ is an ambling, 127km long path that delves into sleepy wooded valleys, over picturesque footbridges, traverses lovingly threaded streams weaved into canvases of billowing meadow grass, and ascends many an ominous purple peak, before dipping into the gently waving sea of Carlow’s friendly hillsides.

My ‘initiation plan’ was simply to walk the 18km section from Knockree to Roundwood. Knowing that I would have to set up camp on in a forest somewhere, I told myself I was prepared to face and overcome any residual childhood fears of being completely alone.

Starting at the foot of Knockree hill I gracelessly heaved my herculean rucksack onto my back and took my first tentative steps into the forest. The trail took me into the river valley of Glencree and then along a zig-zagging donkey path up the forested feet of Maulin, where I found myself at the top of Powerscourt Waterfall watching in awe as the froth of the Dargle River plunged, in its frame of ancient Oak trees over the edge of a strangely prehistoric, fern-covered slope.

A short descent later and I faced the most challenging stretch of the section, leading over the broad and sturdy eastern shoulder of Djouce Mountain at 650m. Battling to stay on my feet against the prevailing south-westerlies, and peering through a heavy bout of sea mist that had suddenly enshrouded the hillside, I had the blissful rapture of glimpsing my home far below nestled within the granite arms of Dun Laoghaire East and West piers.

Following a little sheep-furrow around the neck of Djouce, my stumbling feet found an impressive raised boardwalk which carried me across the soupy mire of protected blanket bog, complete with grazing sheep, shocking splashes of colourful wildflowers, crooked conifers and shivering cotton-tails.

I finally found my campsite by sliding down a grassy slope into the little niche in the hills cradling Ballinasloe woods. As I reverently crept around the edge of the writhing forest grove, with frequent paranoid backward glances, I felt a gospel-silence, the snapping of dry twigs beneath my soles like cataclysmic marble footfalls in a weekday church cavity.

A high pitched scream, terribly human, suddenly tore apart the grey mist and dragged my eyes toward a darting figure fleeing the shadowy trees. A Sika hind veered dangerously around the corner of the tree-line, her shrieking alarm call trailing at her springing feet. I followed and was stunned to find that she had led me to the ideal enclave for my camp, sheltered by the trees from the gale that was blowing itself into a flustered rage around us. I silently thanked her as she faded shade-like back into the vaporous mist and I went about setting up my tent.

The night passed peacefully, and although the occasional alarming shriek pierced the zenith of the howling wind, it now soothed rather than terrified me. A few hours later, unzipping myself from the alien glow of the morning light through the canvas of my tent, I found myself inside a cloud, with eight kilometers still to cover, a camp to break and a track to find.

But with the night passed, victory was already mine. And as the dawning world unfolded before my feet, I knew with certainty, that nothing could stop me now.

[ Irish Times Amateur Travel Writer Competition ]