OPINION (AN COLÚN): Enjoying beauty and being miserable in Northern Ireland

WE are very fortunate to live in such a beautiful country and one of the most beautiful parts of it is the Mourne Mountains.
Last weekend I joined my brother and nephew for a couple of days walking in these hills.
On Saturday we climbed a couple of hills overlooking Spelga Dam. This reservoir sits at 1,200 feet above sea level and it supplies water to the Portadown and Banbridge areas.
In another part of the range there's another two dams called the Ben Crom reservoir and the Silent Valley Reservoir. These two reservoirs supply water for County Down, the surrounding counties and most of Belfast.
We ascended up the heather slope and were soon walking in a cloud at 500 metres. Using my ordnance survey map and compass we navigated our way through the rain and the mist for the next couple of hours. When we reached the top of Carn mountain we met the Mourne Wall, a very useful navigational handrail, 22 miles in length, through the hills. This impressive structure was built in the early 20th Century to prevent sheep and cattle from accessing the reservoirs in the mountains.
On Saturday evening we stayed in a charming, Victorian era B&B beside the long beach in Newcastle. Newcastle has some impressive buildings and is overlooked by the romantic sight of the highest of the Mourne mountains, but its main street is unfortunately a little bit woebegone. Going by the advice of our landlady we visited a busy restaurant on this main street where we could sit down and eat an upmarket fish & chips while drinking a pint of guinness. The background music was country and western and the staff were friendly.
Next day we enjoyed a long walking circuit of the hills surrounding the Rocky River Valley in the western Mournes. This is a bonny area and the hills have some great names such as Hen Mountain, Cock Mountain and Pigeon's Rock Mountain. There are a number of granite tors on Hen's summit, adding great character to the mountain. These tors were once nunataks, during the last Ice Age, and protruded from the surrounding glacier. Millennia of weathering removed the soil and weaker layers of granite which once covered them.
The weather for our Rocky River walk was smashing and the walking superlative. We chatted briefly about CS Lewis' connection with this range. Lewis loved exploring the Mournes. He said he found inspiration in this magical landscape. He wrote that he had seen landscapes in the Mournes which, “under a particular light, made me feel that at any moment a giant might raise his head over the next ridge. I yearn to see County Down in the snow; one almost expects to see a march of dwarfs dashing past. How I long to break into a world where such things were true...That part of Rostrevor which overlooks Carlingford Lough is my idea of Narnia.” Lewis grew up in Belfast until the age of nine when his mother died of cancer and he was sent to school in England. He is often referred to as a British writer but he thought of himself as Irish. He described feeling dismayed when he first moved to England and how he felt homesick for Ireland. He wrote that he loved Irish mythology and the Irish landscape. He pointed out that he longed for vast, empty spaces and cold, remote places. He found this empty and remote quality in the Mournes but there are parts of the range which are gentler. In a poem Lewis spoke about “the goodliness of the soft hills of Down.”
Over the weekend we enjoyed, in terms of the weather, the gentle and soft aspect of this range. I have often walked in it when it is severe and dangerous. For example I did my Mountain Leader training here in November 2002 under the aegis of the Tollymore National Outdoor Centre. For three days we hiked with heavy rucksacks in terrible weather conditions. One evening, after walking in driving rain for several hours we had to descend a steep gully called “Devil's Coachroad”. It was pitch dark, and the wind was strongly buffeting us as we descended the steep slope in driving rain. At the bottom of the gully we were in the Annalong Valley where we found a flattish spot where we could pitch the tents. Because of the difficult conditions it took a long time to get the tents up. One of the group wryly remarked that this experience was “character building.” My tent companion couldn't manage this sort of wry detachment. As we got into our wet sleeping bags I could see by his face that he was hating what we were going through. The last thing he said (with considerable force) before we switched off our head torches was, “This is miserable!”