Ireland day 1444. Thursday 11 September 2025- Malahide GPS

Today’s summary	A nice quiet day in Malahide. Val went for a run and I did some shopping in the morning. We went on our usual walk in the afternoon, over the hill to Portmarnock and back along the coast. Fish finger curry with duty free Rioja for dinner in the evening. Finished off with a bit of TV later
Today’s weather	Mostly dry with occasional showers but some sun too. Strong westerly wind. Feeling much cooler than recently at a maximum of 14c (feels like 9c in the wind, apparently)

Today’s overview location (The blue mark shows the location of our route)		Close-up location (The blue 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): Hill and Coast GPS test

Commentary

I feel to have been quite busy recently – cramming a trip to London and a hip consultation and MRI scan in Southampton into just two days. So a bit of down-time was called for today – and Val didn’t hesitate to agree.

So we made a leisurely start to the day, with tea in bed followed by porridge (with home-made blackberry jelly of course) and coffee for breakfast. Val then decided she needed to get back into her usual exercise routine so she pottered off to the Demesne for a run while I went into Malahide to get some groceries.

Because we’d had quite a substantial – and late – breakfast, we skipped lunch and instead decided to head out for a bit of a leg-stretch. Our favourite “hill and coast” loop walk immediately came to mind, so we committed to that and set off.

It was an enjoyable walk, as always, and this time I decided to test out GPS-measured altitude (as opposed to DEM which I normally use) on my Locus Map tracking app. In the end, it didn’t seem to make much difference although there was more “noise” in the elevation profile. I was pleased to note that elevation gained was almost exactly the same as elevation lost, which is always a reassuring sign on a circular walk.

At Portmarnock we just had to go into the Spar shop where we treated ourselves to rather nice flat whites and pastries, which we enjoyed on the beach. Though I say “enjoyed” in a slightly qualified tone, because it was very cold in the wind, and storm clouds were amassing, so we didn’t hang around too long. I actually began to question the wisdom of wearing shorts today. But as the official short wearing season doesn’t end until mid-October at the very earliest, the possibility of swapping for long trousers could not possibly be entertained.

So once we had withstood the chill for as long as we reasonably could, we headed back to Malahide along the coast path, and completed our loop just before 5pm.

For dinner, Val once again made fish finger curry which was, as always, superb. To accompany it, we shared a bottle of 8 year old Rioja that I bought it duty free at Southampton airport yesterday. It was OK but not worth the premium price. My contribution to the proceedings was to open the wine (a very skilled operation) beforehand and to do the washing up afterwards.

To round off the day, we did as we so often do – enjoyed a bit of light hearted TV on Netflix before finally retiring to bed.

Today’s photos (click to enlarge)


In the woodland along the eastern side of the demesne – one of my favourite sylvan views	The polystyrene houses on Seamount Road appear to be making rapid progress. I wonder how much they will be sold for?

A flock of oystercatchers had settled on the Portmarnock AFC playing fields near Paddy’s Hill – you might just be able to make out the black dots if you look carefully	Storm clouds brewing over the Velvet Strand – though we managed to avoid getting seriously wet



Looking back the way we had come – from Heather Walk in Portmarnock