The Railway Walk

Welcome to the Railway Walk at Tinahely. I'm your guide for the next hour and forty-five minutes or so — that's the time most walkers take, though the beauty of this trail is that nobody's counting. The path is flat, the surface is smooth, and the only thing asking for your attention is the view. Bring a flask, bring a dog, bring the kids. This is south Wicklow at its most generous.

You're standing where, one hundred and sixty years ago, a steam train once pulled into Tinahely station. The line opened in 1865 — the Dublin, Wicklow and Wexford Railway extension — running eighteen miles from Woodenbridge on the Arklow line up the valley of the Derry River, through Aughrim, Tinahely, and on to Shillelagh. It was, at the time, a triumph of Victorian engineering. Heavy stone bridges, deep cuttings, and gentle gradients were carved through these south Wicklow hills to serve the prospering market towns and the big estates that surrounded them — the Fitzwilliams at Coollattin, the Earls of Wicklow further north.

Take a moment before you start. Look back towards the town. If you'd been standing here in, say, 1910, you'd have been watching a porter wheel milk churns up a ramp, a man in a bowler hat checking his pocket watch, and a gaggle of small boys trying very hard to look as though they hadn't come down specifically to stare. The station building is gone. The goods shed is gone. But the platform edge — you're walking on it right now — is still here, and under your feet are the stones that were laid by the hands of men who walked here from Shillelagh and Annacurra, day in, day out, for the two shillings a day that the Railway paid them.

Set off west, with the river on your left. The first few hundred metres take you out past where the old engine shed used to stand, and then the line begins to curve gently away from the town. Notice the low stone walls — those are original. They were built without mortar, a technique called dry-stone walling, and every one of them is a small monument to a forgotten craftsman. Bluebells grow along the base of them in late April and early May, and if you're here in that window, keep your dog out of them — they're protected, and they're magic.

Half a kilometre in, you'll cross a stone bridge that looks much smaller than it is. Step to the right and look down. That's the old goods loop — where trains carrying livestock, potatoes, and barrels of Guinness stout would pull in while a passenger service passed through. South Wicklow, in railway terms, was a working valley. It moved its produce by rail, and it moved its people by rail too. The passenger service closed on the 24th of April 1944; freight continued as far as Aughrim until 1952, and the whole line was officially closed and lifted in 1953. That slow retreat was a quiet amputation for a dozen small towns. The villages that lost their station quickly lost their hotels, their dances, their evening cinema trips. The Railway Walk you're on today is what remained.

You're now entering the section that gives the walk its reputation. The river swings closer, oak and hazel close overhead, and the line runs dead straight for nearly two kilometres through a corridor of green. In May, the bluebell display here is one of the finest in Wicklow. In autumn, the same stretch turns copper and gold, and robins work the hedges with tremendous efficiency. There's a reason the regulars come here every week of the year — it looks different every single month.

You might notice a curious thing about the path underfoot. Every so often, a line of slightly darker stones runs across it — two rows about a metre and a half apart, set into the compacted trackbed. Those are the ghost outlines of the railway sleepers, long since removed, but where the wood rotted into the soil it left its shadow. Nobody takes them up. Nobody would want to.

Keep going. You'll cross a second, larger stone arch about two-thirds of the way along. This one spans a small tributary of the Derry — notice how the arch is keyed with shaped blocks rather than random stones, the mark of a skilled mason. Local tradition holds that the stones came from a quarry near Coolboy, a few miles over the hills. The quarrymen hauled them by cart, and on the day the arch was set, the Catholic curate blessed it with holy water. A railway bridge without a blessing, they said then, was asking for a derailment.

About now, if you're listening and watching, you might hear a raven. There's a pair that nest on the crag above the river a little further on, and they've been here so long the local children call them Ned and Daphne. Ravens mate for life — forty years, sometimes — and these two have probably been together longer than most of the families in the valley. Listen for the deep, clonking call, quite unlike a crow. That's them.

You're approaching the turnaround point. The original line, of course, ran on all the way to Shillelagh — a village whose name gave the world a word. A shillelagh, the stout blackthorn cudgel, took its name from the oak woods that once surrounded this valley. Local tradition holds that oak from the Great Wood of Shillelagh was used in the roof of Westminster Hall in London, built in the 1390s under Richard II — timber so heavy, the story goes, that it needed twenty-six oxen apiece to drag to the ships. Some said the wood was cursed, because the oaks themselves were sacred to the druids. Whatever the truth, most of the Great Wood is gone now. A fragment survives a mile from here, at Tomnafinogue. Worth another walk, another day.

Turn back, and take the return slowly. You've seen the postcard views. Now you get the hidden ones — the moss on the north side of the walls, the way the light falls through the old beech canopy around the four-kilometre mark, the small stone plinth with a carved railwayman's shovel set into it by a local craftsman a few years back in memory of Pat Byrne, who walked this line every day of his life from 1953 until a fortnight before he died in 2011.

As you come back towards Tinahely, notice how the town reveals itself — the spire of the Church of the Assumption first, then the Courthouse, then the line of Georgian shopfronts along the Square. It has been a market town since before there was a railway, and it will be a market town after we are all gone.

One last thing before your tea. Just by the platform, there's a stone set into the wall with the letters "DW and WR" carved into it — Dublin, Wicklow and Wexford Railway. It's the only surviving original company stone on the whole line. Tap it, for luck. Then walk up to the Square, find a seat at Hanlon's, the Bridge Café, or the Courthouse Arts Centre, and if anyone asks where you've been, tell them you walked the ghost of the Tinahely railway. Tell them Ned and Daphne were out. Tell them the bluebells were up. And come back in October to see it all again in a different colour.

That's your audio tour. Thank you for walking with us — and if you enjoyed it, consider supporting the walk by telling another walker. Every recommendation puts a little more heart into a small Wicklow town.