We started off from Harvey’s Point, the famous Donegal Hotel and headed along the shore before realising I left the keys to our other car in the hotel car. That would have been tricky, even if I knew that Rosemary from Bluestacks Centre would have looked after me.
Starting off again, we followed the road with the lakeside on our right surrounded by small drumlins and the Bluestack Hills shadowing us on our left. Tina was examining gates and the different ways that farmers kept them closed. She pointed out a gate with bars bent – fat farmers she explained. They can’t climb over so they bend the horizontals to slide through.
We passed few houses – one new site was just being built which the road skirted around in a circle. It was a bright red steel frame and it looked like a modern sculpture surrounded by the greenery.
The road climbs uphill here, passing by the entrance to Ardnamona Nature Reserve on our right and some hilly Donegal fields to our left with noisy sheep that seemed to be complaining about something. We came to a T-junction and turned right onto the main road. This was quiet. We trundled over a bridge with the the rushing water of a series of waterfalls flowing beneath us being the only noise.
The hills loomed closer to our left while we skirted the nature reserve. The weather was hot and clammy and we could see clouds building already. We passed a house in the woods with either the neatest arrangement of wood storage in the world or some sort of strange modern sculptures.
After another five minutes, we came to Eas Dun Lodge B&B and took the small road up to the left following the little yellow man sign. The road rose sharply here and I could see that we were going to skirt the side of the hill instead of going straight up. It was still a steep ascent with sheep and donkeys looking at us like we were eegits. The upside of this was the views which made every step worthwhile. Every few hundred metres we would stop to catch our breath and look back the way we had come.
As the road rose, the surface got rougher until we found ourselves trudging an old gravel stone path. There were no more houses ahead of us anymore. All we could see was the wide open uplands of the Donegal hills.
Behind us and bearing down quickly on us was a different weather pattern. Being pure hill-walking novices we looked at that with a sort of mild curiosity, but thought no more about it.
It moved in quickly. We stopped, threw on the rainjackets and carried on. By the time we got to the top of the rise, the rain was bucketing down. I looked at my shorts and they seemed to be swimming. They had that look of paper reaching maximum saturation. For about 5 minutes I thought I can handle this. The jacket was doing its business and I’m Irish, how bad can it get? Then the rain started to soak down my socks and within 30 seconds my shoes were swimming.
A bedraggled sheep on the path looked at us with a sort of anger about the fact that we had actually chosen this as a leisure activity. After about another 2 minutes I discovered that my rainproof jacket had reached its limit and my t-shirt was now sopping. While the rain did not have the sea wind of our last Donegal experience, it made short work of us.
This was where my phone died. I couldn’t take any photos anymore. It’s a remote place so pictures don’t tend to do it justice anyway. We crested the hill and walked down into the Eglish Valley, tramping through small streams that flooded the gravel trail, trying to stay on dry ground more from the challenge than any expectation of actually staying dry.
The valley is long, stretching on for miles towards the grey outcrops that make for good rock-climbing. The remains of old stone houses sit along the trail. Eventually the gravel road became a paved road once again. The sun came out and we started to pass modern farmhouses and cottages. We were deep in the valley at this stage and the vegetation was lush. All we could hear were buzzing insects and birds. We stopped for lunch in a clearing here as we knew there was more rain on the way. The sun was hot enough to dry out my jacket somewhat.
From here the road heads back towards civilisation, passing houses until we met another T-junction. We turned right here, as the rain arrived again and as we walked across the bridge over the Eglish river. By the time we got to the ruins of Meenataggard Dance Hall we were drenched again. We didn’t even know it was the dance hall as it just looked like an ordinary house.
We followed the road straight on until we came to another house at the end of the road with a way marked stile leading into a field. The rain cleared again and that turned out to be it for the day. The field was wet and boggy and the trail involved walking across random wood and metal supports which someone had placed here and there to try and avoid most of the water. It gave us something to aim for rather than just walk straight through the water but I doubt it made any real difference to how wet we were.
After a few hundred metres the trail left the fence and we followed the yellow man signs south across the open field towards the ruins of an old house. Beyond that was the Struell River which was guarded by sheep and a heron who flapped off into the distance. We crossed the bridge here and were back on a paved road again.
The sun was out. Our jackets were stowed away again. The Bluestacks Way continues right here but we turned left as we were heading to the car in the Bluestacks Centre. Ahead of us was a group of cows who had broken free of the field and were pretending that they belonged on the narrow road. They were not so pleased to see us appear. For about 200m we walked on with six cows in front of us, followed along by a herd of curious cows in the fields who looked like this was the most exciting thing they had ever witnessed. Eventually we came to another section of the road where the fence had sunk into the ground. The six cows took their chances and hightailed it back to their friends where they no doubt regaled them of the time they took to the roads.
The road back to the car was 3km long, narrow and extremely straight. This made it very dull. The scenery was grand but a lot more cultivated than the Eglish Valley. At the top of each rise you would expect to see the centre but all you got was another long narrow road stretching into the distance. The highlight of this stretch was Tina’s Birdnerd app which she was using to identify the songs of different birds.
Finally we turned a corner, came to a junction and turned right to pass a pub and a small council estate of houses before we reached the Centre.
Google Maps: 54.697078, -8.055077
Distance: 16 km
Time: Four hours
Type of walk: Small roads and waymarked way
Views: Lakeland, uplands, valley
Animals: Horses, donkeys, cows, sheep, heron.
Humans: One jogger, two dog-walkers.
Score: 9/10