Ireland day 1452. Friday 19 September 2025- Guests 2

Today’s summary	Today we were supposed to go with our friends to the Malahide cricket match (Ireland v England). But it rained all day so after an hour or so staring at a rain soaked pitch we left and went to the pub. Fish finger curry and Barbie movie in the evening.
Today’s weather	Heavy rain all night then lighter rain most of the day. Light south westerly wind. Appx 15c

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): Wandering about in Malahide

Commentary

One of the iconic annual fixtures of the Malahide social calendar is the international cricket, which comes to a temporary stadium in the Castle Demesne every year or so, in September. This year, three days of matches, featuring Ireland vs England, were scheduled. As a treat, our visitors who are staying with us had bought us tickets for today’s game.

The sad fact about September in Ireland, though, is that the weather tends to be unpredictable. And that became all too apparent today.

It had been raining all night and by the time we got up this morning, it didn’t really show any signs of slowing down. So we had a leisurely morning with a substantial breakfast in the flat and then went on a short walk.

Finally, at about 1pm, we walked across the road to the cricket ground and found our seats in the stand. Then we sat and waited. The start time of 1:30pm came and went, and we sat and sat and sat as the rain teemed down.

Eventually, it became evident that play was unlikely to start anytime in the near future, so we decided to cut our losses and retired to Gibneys pub, in Malahide town centre. We held out a forlorn hope that play might eventually start, but the rain just never stopped (and it’s still coming down now at 11pm – fully 26 hours since it started). The match was officially declared a washout at about 4:30 pm so we made an afternoon of it and stayed in the pub. Anyway we had an enjoyable afternoon there, with a couple of pints of Guinness to wash down our burgers and chips.

Afterwards we returned to the flat for a cup of tea. Val and I slipped out for a quick wander round the Demesne while our guests put their feet up for a bit.

Later on in the evening, Val made us a delicious fish finger curry which we lingered over and reflected on the day. Finally, we treated ourselves to a movie night-in and watched that highbrow classic “Barbie”.

So all in all a very unusual but extremely interesting day, despite the cricketing disappointment.

Today’s photos (click to enlarge)


Heading into the grounds which we had watched being lovingly created over the last few weeks	The covers were on the pitch when we arrived – and they stayed there all day, immobile

Hope springs eternal but we decided not to wait for eternity. So plan B was called for..	..plan B – retire to the pub and stay there!



The band of rain was focused on Malahide cricket ground with almost laser-like precision. Most of the rest of the British Isles had warm sunshine. Unbelievably bad luck!