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Bad management, no vision in the Slieve Aughty region
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I have often driven from Portumna to Gort across the beautiful and vast, open space that is the Slieve Aughty mountain region. There are very few houses in this enormous place and a great deal of indiscriminate sitka spruce planting. My heart has often ached as I drove through as I could sense the lost potential and the lack of appropriate management of a special place. The lost potential relates to the tree cover and the lack of trails. If the people who manage this land changed the tree cover from the industrial mono-culture of the sitka spruce to deciduous trees (reasonably spaced out, like a natural forest) then the character of much of the region would be dramatically changed. Where once there had been conifer woodland which was impossible to walk through and which contained a barren floor, there would now be more light, more growth, more wildlife. A place which made you feel despair because you we
A mural by Aches on Cork s Anglesea Street. Photo: Clare Keogh
“Getting the ‘walking bug’ is one of the few positive things to come out of 2020,” says Sara Zimmerman of Travel Department and TD Active. Bookings for future walking trips are outperforming all other holidays, both for overseas and homegrown options like their four-night Kerry Walking Holiday, she adds.
“So many more people have taken to the great outdoors during lockdowns to exercise and for their headspace, which has reinvigorated both the appeal and appetite to explore more on foot.”
New trails are being created, upgraded or waymarked both for local communities and future visitors all over the world. In Spain, the Camino’s Holy Year will be stretched over 2021 and 2022. New Zealand has added a new trail to its 12 ‘Great Walks’, with huts to stay in along the way.