Ireland day 0649. Sunday 09 July 2023- Clontarf Bull and Anne *

Ireland day 0649. Sunday 09 July 2023- Clontarf Bull and Anne

Today’s summary	Walking club hike from Clontarf Road to Dollymount and on to St Anne’s Park
Today’s weather	A shower first thing in the morning, but after that it was bright, mostly dry, breezy and sunny all day. Strong southerly wind. Appx 19C

Today’s overview location (The green mark shows the location of our route)		Close-up location (The orange 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): Clontarf Bull Island and St Anne's Park DWC

Commentary

(Summary blog only. Last full blog was Day 0368).

I always like the Club walks from Clontarf Road. It’s easy to get to the start on the train, there is lots to see along the route, and there is a delicatessen almost next door to the station (Lott’s) that I like looking in before the walk gets going, because the range of things it sells is fantastic, and the prices it charges are ridiculously extravagant.

Today a good crowd showed up at the station, and once Val and I had examined the deli (and splashed out on a sausage roll) we all set off and headed down the promenade, past all the late 1950s art deco bathing paraphernalia, to the wooden bridge at Dollymount.

Despite threatening looking clouds and a brief shower just before we set off, the sun came out and it was bright all day. In fact the sun, combined with a very fresh gale, left many of us with bright pink faces by the time we reached the end. As we had only set out at noon, it was soon time for lunch so we stopped to enjoy our sandwiches (and sausage roll) in the dunes once we had crossed over to the island.

After lunch (and of course an extended chat), one of our party decided to go swimming (a “courageous” decision given the jellyfish and the abundant green algae) and the rest of us pushed on to the end of the north wall and the “Our Lady” statue. From there, half the party decided to retrace their steps to Clontarf Road, and the rest of us walked along the beach on the south east side of the island, admiring the wind-surfers who seemed to spend more of their time in the air than in the water, and then across the causeway over to St Anne’s Park.

The highlight of the park was the rose garden, which has possibly the best collection of roses I’ve seen anywhere in the world and at this time of year it’s simply stunning. Well, that concludes the report from Ireland today. Time to catch up on a bit of Netflix now, I think.

Today’s photos (click to enlarge)


Your eyes don’t deceive you. The one, larger, red tomato in the box was for sale in Lott’s on Clontarf Road for an eye-watering €6	Heading over the wooden bridge to Bull Island. The attractive lawn is actually green algal slime washed up on the mudflat on the inner shore of the island near Dollymount. And it was slowly rotting in the sun so in reality it wasn’t very attractive at all.

Another nine reasons not to go sea-swimming at the moment	Kite Surfers were out in force at Dollymount and making the most of the seemingly-favourable wind conditions.

Launch zone for kite-surfers!	In the Rose Garden in St Anne’s Park. The roses were looking absolutely stunning, even if my hair wasn’t

*The statue of Our Lady, Star Of The Sea (Réalt na Mara) at the far end of the North Bull Wall*