Ireland day 0160. Monday 07 March 2022- Rush2

Today’s summary	Video call to UK and admin in the morning, drove up to Rush for chilly walk on beach in afternoon
Today’s weather	High cloud, occasional sun. Moderate south-easterly wind. About 6C but feeling colder in the wind

Today’s overview location (The blue mark shows the location of our route)		Close-up location (The green line shows where we walked) (Click button below to download GPX of today’s walk as recorded, or see interactive map at bottom with elevations corrected): Rush to the sea

Commentary

I am going to be a bit brief tonight as I have been successfully prevaricating all evening and only just got round to writing up this blog. It’s almost 10 o’clock now and I still haven’t had my dinner!

The morning was spent on a video call with a family member back in the UK – always good to catch up on the news – and dealing with some admin matters. By the time I’d done all that, it was well into the afternoon, so I jumped in the car (hooray) and decided to head a short way up the coast, to try and do a more thorough exploration of the coastal town of Rush. I’d visited there a number of weeks ago, but had had to travel by train and didn’t have long to look around. Today, time wasn’t so pressing but when I got there and stepped out of the car, I realised that it wasn’t a day for hanging around. There was a stiff wind blowing up from the southeast and the temperature barely struggled up to 6C which meant, when combined with the overcast sky, that it felt pretty cold.

I parked by the south beach and briefly watched the kitesurfers before heading off to the left, behind the Martello Tower, to the north beach by way of the harbour. It’s a nice little spot – only a couple of small fishing boats there now – but peaceful and quiet. You can walk through the harbour at low tide (it was just about low enough when I got there) and out onto the north beach proper. It’s another of those broad sandy expanses which the east coast of Ireland does so well, and in stark contrast to Portmarnock beach yesterday, there was only one other person on it apart from me.

I wanted to get up to the northern end of the beach and then up the cliffs to try and visit the other Rush Martello tower, which is situated on a headland just beyond the beach. But when I got to the end of the beach, although I found a rough path up through the cliffs, the top was just private farmland and the path disappeared. There seemed to be no way of accessing the Martello – not from this side at any rate.

But the disappointment of the Martello was more than compensated for by the excellence of the geology. The cliffs are made up of remarkable slabs of tilted sedimentary rock, rising about 10-15 metres up out of the sand. Apparently they are lower carboniferous mudstones, some 340 million years old. This site actually represent one of the best examples of these types of rock anywhere in Ireland or Britain.

With the geology out of the way, I headed back into Rush and walked out to Kenure Park. It’s a pleasant enough place, but only a shadow of its former grandeur – as the pictures below show. At that point I spotted a large Tesco supermarket nearby and as I still needed to get some mayonnaise, I thought I would just drop in a pick some up. Needless to say I got a bit distracted by the clearance sale going on in the cakes and biscuits aisle so I stocked up with as as much as I could carry and completely forgot the mayonnaise. Anyway, I was pleased with my bargains and decided they went some small way towards compensating for the fact that the price of petrol is rapidly on its way to doubling since we arrived here last year. Thank goodness the Yaris isn’t thirsty!

Today’s photos (click to enlarge)


These kitesurfers seem to get everywhere, and in fact the worse the weather becomes the more enthusiastic they get. On the beach, looking across the Rogerstown estuary to Portrane	Overlooking the harbour from a small park in the centre of Rush. The piers were originally built in the 1400s and by the mid-1800s, Rush was one of the most important fishing ports on the East coast

At the far end of Rush North beach, these amazing slabs of rock, about 10 metres high, rise out of the sea. The strata are piled up on top of each other like leaves of a book. mThen the top of the whole formation is neatly carved off by a layer of glacial till, probably only about 15,000 years old.	This is the entrance to Kenure park. It used to be the driveway leading to the magnificent mansion at Kenure House. Sadly it was demolished in 1978 and nowadays all that is at the end of the driveway is a huge housing estate. The portico of the old house is still standing – somewhere in Rush – but I couldn’t find it. The park which has been built along the sides of the driveway is pleasant

I thought that this was a joke until I saw that Tesco was even more expensive €2.05 a litre. It was €1.30 when we arrived last September. The price you pay for war.	At the end of the day I paid a most satisfactory visit to Tesco

The geology at the end of the beach is really interesting – this two metre high hole in the cliffs particularly caught my eye