……. YOUTH HOSTEL ASSOCIATION’S MOURNE WALL WALK WAS TOO DEMANDING – AND FAR TOO POPULAR!
BY BRIAN OGLE
AFTER my short piece the other day about running the first Belfast City Marathon with virtually no training or preparation, and at the risk of appearing the athletic equivalent of an anti-Vaxer – an anti-Trainer, I recall completing the Mourne Wall Walk with not only no preparation, no proper weather-proof clothes, no suitable footwear and apart from a couple of Mars bars, no sustenance for the 22-mile journey, rather expedition.
The Mourne Wall Walk, for those who haven’t heard of it, was organised annually by the Youth Hostel Association of Northern Ireland and was a 22-mile endurance test, certainly not a ‘walk’ at all, covering all the dozen or so major peaks in the Mournes, following the route of the Water Commissioners Boundary Wall, in which more than 10,000 feet (yes, that’s almost exactly a third of the height of Mount Everest) are climbed in one day, pretty incredible when you think of it…!!!
The walk began in the late Fifties but became so popular that it was eventually abandoned in 1984 because it was too popular and because almost 4,000 pairs of feet were doing such damage to the fragile Mournes environment.
Anyway, my lack of preparation, or naivety perhaps, was mirrored the first year I did it in bad weather conditions by many hundreds of others, who had to receive first aid treatment, or be rescued and taken off the mountains mostly suffering from exposure and minor injuries.
I was one of the few hundred, in a football shirt, shorts and trainers who did incredibly make the finish at Silent Valley that year, although I remember I was virtually on my hands and knees after ‘wee Binnian’ when I reached the finish on the Head Road, near the entrance to Silent Valley. I recall being supported by a couple of St Johns Ambulance volunteers for the last 100 yards or so and being half-carried to a first aid tent where I needed 10 cups of hot strong tea to bring me round and stop me shaking.
There was such an attrition rate on the mountains that year because of incessant rain and fog that the organisers brought in a strict mandatory dress code for the event in future and decreed that everyone must in future carry adequate food and water for the day. As I remember, you started between 6.00 and 7.00 in the morning, and if you hadn’t reached the Hare’s Gap (about two thirds of the way round) by say 5.00 in the evening you were disqualified from continuing on the grounds that it would be dangerous to be on the hills so late in the evening, and you still had the three highest peaks Comedagh, Donard and Binnian to go
Anyway, I learnt my lesson, I was better prepared the next year and actually did it three more times more before it was eventually abandoned in 1984 because of the punishment the paths along the high Mournes were taking. I never really was that fit, more very very determined and dogged and actually made it to the finish in the first four hundred or so finishers the year the Walk had so many ‘fallers’.
I’m not celebrating now though – I need two knee replacements – something to do with running down so many mountains I think….!
The 'Travel' Life of Brian 