New Year’s Day Walk
First walk of the year and we decided to stroll up Milk Hill.
We started at a forest entrance near Tooreen West and followed the forest track up to its end, passing a well marked stone circle on the way.
From the end of the forest track, we decided to make our way through the trees and hand rail the tree line up the hill. The tree line proved a job to get to. We pushed our way through the pine needled branches of vindictive trees, navigating around pools and streams of running water, and stopping to look at flattened grass patches where deer had been sheltering.
At the tree line, we clambered up a ditch and over a low barbed wire fence before continuing on up the hill, over ‘hillocky’ terrain.
Using Viewranger, we established the location of the summit. According to mountainviews.ie, there was a wooden cross at the top of the hill in late 2020, but we didn’t see it, or the pile of stones that it was supposedly standing in.
But, it was foggy, very foggy, as can be seen from the photo below.
We took a compass bearing back to the forest, and after a short descent, we could see the tree line appear out of the fog. This time, rather than battle our way through the trees, we made our way down to the bottom of the field we were in until we came to the corner where we easily climbed over a section of low fence and onto the forest path.
The rain started then as we made our way back to the car, the first day of 100 days of walking completed.