Forest, Lake and Frogsong: an Irish walk in March

Sometimes, thinking about walking routes or camping spots, it strikes you that places you’ve always thought of as separate are in fact linked by potential routes. These walks can be impractical verging on impossible; or they can strike like one of Homer Simpson’s long-overdue revelations: why hadn’t I thought of that before? Doh!

With work about to begin on a new contract that was likely to keep me desk bound for some time, I wanted to spend my last day of freedom on a long hike. I’ve been eyeing a trail in the Mourne mountains for a while, but the two-hour drive didn’t appeal. I wanted something near home. But I also wanted something different.

Looking at the map, it struck me that some of my favourite places were only a few kilometres from one another. And a mini-landscape I’d wanted to investigate for some time - the low snouty hill called Skerrywhirry and farmland beneath it - lay nearby. I sketched a route, packed a day-sack, and set off into a day brighter and warmer than I had any right to expect.

First to Ballyboley forest, a favourite haunt. I puffed uphill from the carpark into tree cover full of birdsong, while the fire dams and pathside ditches were loud with snoring frogs. I peered down: the water splashed and twitched around glutinous heaps of spawn.

Frogs froze when my shadow passed over, then resumed their croaking as I moved away. I fell into conversation with a fellow walker, a man armed with an imposingly long-lensed camera. What was the red-breasted bird I’d seen in the trees, like a big robin? Probably a crossbill, he suggested. I filed the clue away for future reference. He eyed the area of clear-felled woodland beside us, and tutted about the potential damage to nesting birdlife. All the same, I offered, this wasn’t always woodland. A friend gave me an old map where Ballyboley is upland moor. And he agreed that the open land has its own impressive birdlife.

At the far western edge of Ballyboley lies Killylane reservoir. I stopped for a snack on a fishing platform by the scintillating water, watching a small object - a toy yacht? - zig-zag across the surface of the lake.

A voice behind me asked if I was intending to fish, then explained half-apologetically and half-proud that the small vessel was a GPS-guided sonar probe, a kind of water-drone, mapping the depth of the water. ‘We have no idea,’ the proud pilot told me, ‘just what volume of water the reservoir holds.’

The next stretch followed the main Shane’s Hill road between Larne and Ballymena for a mile or so. The road is narrow but busy, feedstuff hauliers and milk tankers signalling the agri-food economy of the region. Their drivers lifted a hand or a couple of fingers in acknowledgement as they sped past. I was glad to double-back onto a minor road, part of the Antrim Hills Way, that led back eastward past the Glenwhirry Hill Farm research station towards Hightown and Agnew’s Hill.

The unseasonal temperature rose as I followed the narrow road to where the tarmac petered out and the track led through sheep pens and skylark-patrolled moorland. Hightown, with its precarious cairn, grew clearer. I’d thought I might climb on to Agnew’s Hill, but in the end Hightown was enough.

As the afternoon drew on, the views to the south past Larne Lough and Islandmagee, to Belfast under Cave Hill and the Mournes beyond, were hazing over.

I cut back down the hillside, following the Ulster Way marker stakes through quaky ground back to the edge of Ballyboley. There was the Shane’s Hill road again, and the path back to the carpark.

I’d been walking for five hours, give or take breaks for lunch, photography, chats with passersby, and listening to the birds and frogs. It was evening, and time for a pint...