Kyle Loop

Welcome to the Kyle Loop. You're up in the hills above Tinahely now, on a quiet road that almost no tourists find, and that's a good thing — because this loop belongs, in a quiet way, to the people who live up here. Farmers. Foresters. The odd ambitious runner. And a small number of walkers who, like you, asked a local where to go after they'd done the Railway Walk.

The loop is eight and a half kilometres, roughly figure-of-eight shaped, and takes most people about two and a half hours. Some of it is quiet tarmac lane; some of it is soft forest track; some of it is a rough stretch of open bogland near the top that — on a clear day — will give you one of the best views in south Wicklow.

Start at the old Kyle School. The building you're looking at closed as a school in the 1960s, but for a century before that it served the children of a townland that, at its peak, supported nearly three hundred people. Today there are perhaps thirty. Rural depopulation, emigration, and the shift away from small-holding farming did what famines and evictions failed to do: it emptied the hill. The houses you'll pass today — many of them ruins, a few still inhabited — are the bones of a community that was.

Head east, climbing gently. The first kilometre is steady pulling up a single-track road with grass growing down the middle. This is known locally as the Mass Path, because before cars, the families of Kyle walked down it every Sunday morning to the chapel in Tinahely. Three miles to Mass, three miles back. In the winter you left before first light. In the summer, if you were a child, you were allowed dawdle — and there were stories told, decades later, of the blackberries being so thick along this stretch that you'd arrive back home with your Sunday clothes stained and a tongue like a dock leaf.

At the first junction, bear right onto a forestry track. You're now climbing more steeply into the Coillte-owned plantation that covers the upper slopes of the townland. Sitka spruce, mostly, with patches of larch — the latter turns brilliant gold in October. This plantation is not as old as it looks; most of the trees you see went in during the 1980s as part of a national planting programme, and they'll be harvested on a fifty-year cycle. Every so often you'll come across a clear-felled patch, which looks shocking at first glance. It isn't. Within five years, the ground is a riot of foxglove and willowherb, and within twenty, the new trees are taller than you are. The cycle turns.

Listen for a moment. If you're here between April and July, you'll almost certainly hear a cuckoo. Wicklow is one of the last reliable strongholds for cuckoos in Leinster. Their two-note call drifts across these hills from dawn to mid-morning, and it's the sound most locals associate with late spring. If you hear one, stop. Listen. Fewer and fewer children grow up knowing that sound, and that's a kind of loss we don't have a word for yet.

About three kilometres in, you reach the highest point of the loop — a small clearing at roughly three hundred metres above sea level, with a bench cut from a single block of local granite. Sit on it. To the north you can see the flank of Croghan Mountain, which straddles the Wicklow-Wexford border. To the east, on a clear day, you can see a blue thread on the horizon: that's the Irish Sea, about fifteen miles away as the crow flies. And to the west and south, rolling hills and patchwork fields, the farmland of south Wicklow as it has looked for three centuries.

From the bench, the path turns south and drops through a section of old broadleaf woodland. Watch your step — the surface gets softer and, after rain, quite muddy. This stretch of woodland is a remnant of the original mixed forest that covered Kyle before the plantations arrived. Oak, ash, hazel, holly. There's a well on the left side of the path, about halfway down, marked by a small stone cairn. It's called Saint Bridget's Well locally, though there's no church record of any dedication. Wells like this one were part of a pre-Christian landscape of small sacred places. The custom of tying a rag to the hawthorn above the well — you'll see a few if you look — is older than most of the Christianity on the island. Leave the rags alone. Don't take a photograph of them up close.

At the bottom of the woodland, you join a farm lane. Watch for livestock. The field on the right is usually grazed by a herd of Aberdeen Angus cattle owned by one of the local families — they're placid enough, but if you have a dog, keep it on the lead here, because they will take an interest. About four hundred metres along the lane, you pass the ruin of what was once a two-storey farmhouse. It was abandoned in the 1950s. The current owner, a third-generation farmer whose grandfather grew up there, has said several times that he'd restore it if time allowed. Time doesn't, often.

The last kilometre brings you back around to the Mass Path and down to the school. As you descend, the view opens up and Tinahely re-appears in the fold of the valley below. You can see the spire of the Church of the Assumption, the curve of the Derry River, the green fringe of the Railway Walk. Not a bad place to come home to.

A few notes for the road. There is no café on the loop — you're on your own for tea until you're back in town. There is one water tap, at the rear of a farmyard about halfway around, marked with a small blue sign saying "Walkers welcome." You're welcome, but it's a tap, not a pub — fill your bottle and move on. Mobile coverage is patchy on the higher section, so tell someone where you're going. And if you meet a farmer on a tractor: pull in, wave, say hello. They'll stop for a chat if you want one, and there are few better sources of local information than a man who's been driving a tractor up and down this lane since 1978.

Thanks for walking with us. Kyle Loop is a quiet walk for quiet people. Let it stay that way.