Day 21, 500 km Clonegall – Tinahely

Weather: 🌤️🌤️🌬️🌤️🌤️
Picnic: 🌯🌯 (2 out of 5, reasonable spot to dry out the tent, lunch with leftover wraps and hardkeks)
Track: ☘️☘️☘️☘️ (4 out of 5, nice tracks and roads, beautiful views and a surprise pub!)
Milestone: 500 km!
Hidden gem: the Dying cow pub right after our 500 km point! Time for a beer!
Hotel: 🛌🛌🛌🛌 (4 out of 5 great beds, good shower and excellent hiker service!)
Name of followed trail: Wicklow way
Special thanks to: our fellow Wicklow way hiker whom we surprised on trail today! Good to see other stealth camping hikers enjoying Ireland!

After a good night of sleep (although Mark struggled a bit with his sleepingbag to stay warm…), we snooze for a bit before we get up from our nice level ground beds. We call it level-tent-appreciation time. Happy moments on trail…😅

We hike out of our little forest and see another hiker with a big pack approaching. This young man is almost at the end of his Wicklow way, and really liked it! He assumes it’s our first day on trail and is quite surprised to hear of our journey and destination, and immediately asked if we have a blog. Proudly we hand over one of our stickers. So happy we brought these!

It was really good to finally meet a fellow multi day hiker that camps out. So far, we’ve just met people on daily walks.

we continue our way over quite a steep hill (with great views) and through another forest. From there we find our way through the countryside. It’s still grassy green lands, but something definitely changed over the last 2 weeks. The countryside is more cultivated and the plots of land are larger. It’s cool to see these changes happen while walking through a country .

We pass our 500 km point today, right after passing an (unfortunately closed) honesty box. This trail is a lot more embedded in the surroundings than the others, with signposts, honesty boxes etc along the way!

After we marked our 500 km with branches, we walk past a statue and an old building. When I look closer, it appears to be a pub! When we go into the Dying Cow pub, it’s actually open! Really happy we stopped, because it’s a really cool pub and the best for celebrating our 500 km milestone!

we meet an English family there who is searching for the family home of their father who left the country in 1942. We have a chat with them, and later with the owner and a guy at the bar. Having a chat in a pub has never been easier than in Ireland!

we leave the pub again and continue the last 7 km to Tinahely. Just as I say to Mark that weve had a lot of roads and tracks the last week, the trail tuns right over a style into a grassy lane in between the fields. We immediately got what we wished for! Thank you Ireland!

Tinahely is a perfect town for a zeroday, compact town centre with a supermarket and a few restaurants. And we found a great place to stay at Madeline’s! Good beds, and when we asked them how we could get our laundry done, they offered to do it for us. What a great service!

In the supermarket we meet the family from the pub again, and they actually found the house! Overgrown, like half of Ireland’s properties, but after years they finally found it! We congratulate them on this achievement and head to our hotel.

We take a shower and dig up whatever is stil clean from the backpack, so we can go out for dinner in our best hiking attire… For Mark all he has left is shorts and shirt, and I have my long johns and a shirt… We’re a fine looking pair indeed😅😅 Luckily nobody seems to care at Connors bar, and we have a nice steak diner!