OPINION (AN COLÚN): In touch with beauty in the Lough Derg hills

WE SUN-STARVED HIBERNIANS have felt blessed this month. No longer do we feel like denizens of the chilly North Atlantic, but as if our beautiful island has shifted south by some miraculous deed of God.
It's been good hasn't it? The hot temperatures and cloudless days, which means that long-neglected t-shirts and shorts were suddenly resurrected from their drawers. For most of the year these shorts and t-shirts are accustomed to our indifference towards them, but for several days now we have been wearing them all the time.
Hot weather in Ireland is also the time when the males of the population start walking around our streets bare-chested. Live and let live I say. If people, either male or female, want to wander around the streets of our towns and villages bare-chested then I am not going to object; but you would never catch me doing it, because I believe that the swimming pool and seaside are the correct locations for this state of undress in public, not an urban setting.
Anyway, on Saturday I did what the experts in our national media were telling us not to do, namely, I undertook an awful lot of exercise in the heat. Nine hours to be precise; of walking up and down steep slopes in the Arra Hills overlooking Lough Derg. The Arra Hills are modest in height and some might sniffily dismiss them, but on Saturday they felt like God's own country. The brown and green slopes of these rolling hills were projected sharply against a completely cloudless sky.
My walk started at the Lookout near the village of Portroe. The Lookout is a wonderful spot. Perched on a slope it offers magnificent views of Lough Derg. On the western shores the hills of Slieve Bearnagh and Slieve Aughty taper away to the lowlying country around Portumna. I could see the round tower of Holy Island in the Mountshannon area. I scanned the sky for the splendid white-tailed eagles but alas could see none (you can view the eagles with powerful uniscopes set up on the lakeshore in Mountshannon. I did this a couple of times in the past and could see the eagles resting in the tall trees of an island out on the lake; sadly they didn't fly on either occasion).
My walk was the Arra Loop. It's well signposted throughout, with green arrows. Give yourself about five or six hours to walk it. I took nine hours because I enjoy dilly-dallying from time to time and spacing out. At the top of the first steep climb you are at about 1500 feet and the view from here on Saturday could only be described in superlatives. People sometimes disparage our midland hills, but this was as beautiful and special a place as anywhere on the planet. The walk goes past a millennium cross and the shattered remains of its predecessor which was struck by lightning in the 1940s. They say only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noonday sun but hereabouts I passed a few other walkers and a couple of mountain runners.
I paused for a while at the famous “Graves of the Leinstermen”. There's a myth that the disapproving wife of Brian Boru ordered the massacre of her future son-in-law and his men at this spot, but the collapsed stones are in fact the remains of a megalithic tomb. Seated in this ancient place I read a few poems by the Birr late 19th early 20th Century poet Susan Mitchell. Her descriptions of beauty and God tallied perfectly with these beautiful hills. One of the poems is called “Amergin.” Amergin was one of the Milesians but to me he sounds like the voice of God, the voice of beauty: “The fretted waters I hold in the hollow of my hand. / From my heart go fire and dew and the green and the brown land.”
After the Graves there's a steep climb up to the top of Tountinna (meaning 'Hill of the Wave' - named after a Biblical flood that, according to the ancient Book of Invasions, drowned all but one of the first Irish inhabitants).
I walked by a small lake called Black Lough where a man was flying a model aeroplane, and about here my two feet started giving me grief. My right foot was beset by plantar fasciitis. My left foot, I don't know what was going on. The next couple of hours on the way back to the car were unpleasant, entailing several stops to remove my boots, massage my feet (sometimes vigorously), and stretch my limbs. I was fearful that my tendons would give up the ghost completely but thankfully they didn't. I hobbled on and made it back to the car at 9 in the evening, something of a wreck, where I discarded my saturated shirt and drank about two litres of water.