Ireland day 0719. Sunday 17 September 2023- Meteorite *

Ireland day 0719. Sunday 17 September 2023- Meteorite

Today’s summary	Joined a group of DWC walkers at Sutton station for a hike back to Portmarnock (though I carried on to Malahide). Tried to find the “meteorite” crater on Portmarnock beach
Today’s weather	Grey and either drizzling or raining all day. No sun. Light easterly wind. Appx 16c

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): Meteorite hunting on Portmarnock Beach DWC

Commentary

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

In a most unusual turn of events, the newspapers were telling us last week that a strange looking “crater” seemed to have appeared on Portmarnock beach. The excitement was heightened when a Dave, a “local cosmologist” was interviewed on TV claiming that it was almost certainly caused by a meteorite crashing to earth.

By this week, the media frenzy seemed to have died down, but when a DWC walk from Sutton today was planned to traverse the very spot where it had supposedly landed, it seemed like far too interesting a trip to miss.

So, after I’d made lunch and Val had gone off to work, I gathered my waterproofs (it was a very wet day) and caught the 102 down to Sutton. There was just time for a quick coffee from the micro-café at the station, then we set off on our expedition. We headed quickly north, making a detour to explore the old Baldoyle Racecourse (closed in 1972) and the nearby allotment gardens. The allotments, by the way, always look well cared for and there were abundant (and tempting) raspberries, tomatoes, apples and pears on display. All looking very nutritious but they do need to be picked quickly before they rot in the wet weather.

Eventually, after a brief lunch stop in the park alongside Strand Road, a few of us made it to the beach (the rest took one look at the impending storm clouds and decided to go to the pub instead). We walked the beach from the mid-point all the way to the swimming shelters at the north end. But although we saw a few suspicious holes dug by enthusiastic beachgoers, and numerous spectacularly revolting jellyfish that looked as if they might have been delivered from outer space, we couldn’t convince ourselves that any of these fascinating features could possibly be cosmologist Dave’s impact crater. So we resignedly concluded that, exciting as a real meteorite strike would have been, today just wasn’t going to be our lucky day.

Anyway, despite our disappointments, the rest of our terrestrial walk was a success – I walked all the way back to Malahide, but the rest of the group jumped onto a H2 bus that handily came speeding by just as the rain started to come down more heavily.

Once back in the flat, I changed into some dry clothes, got the dinner ready, and made some hot drinks ready for when Val came home. And so ended a day that truly was, in so many ways, out of this world.

Today’s photos (click to enlarge)


The curious thatched cottage in Baldoyle. It’s two-tone presumably because the outer layer must have been stripped off and replaced by new straw in order to preserve its waterproofness	There are some well-kept allotment gardens alongside Red Arches Road – those pears looked tempting..

Artichoke looking a bit past its best in one of the allotments. Or maybe it was grown as an ornamental feature	Interestingly-decorated wastewater pumping station alongside the Baldoyle Greenway. It’s part of a poetry trail, so the notice tells us

A possible candidate crater? Certainly looks like it could have been made by unnatural forces	Looking a bit like an alien that has just slithered out of the crater. Actually, it’s a Lion’s Mane jellyfish. Even though it was 0.5m across, this one would be classified as “small”. “Big” ones can be four times that diameter. Ugh.

Ah well…