After a few years of looking yearningly at photos of grit tors with seaside views, I finally made it to Northern Ireland’s Mourne Mountains last week.

I flew in to Belfast under a clear blue sky, only to hear an apocalyptic weather forecast for the following day. It was depressingly accurate, and I genuinely wavered while sat in the car park the next morning – I eventually decided to just go for it though. The cloud level was just above the car park, and within about a quarter of a mile I was deep in it.

An information board made some vague claims about the views, but I can neither confirm nor deny their accuracy I’m afraid!

I had planned to do the Inner Mourne Horseshoe, which takes in a few summits over 700m. With gale-force southwesterlies forecast I revised the plan and decided to instead stay low and head up the Annalong Valley for a bit. Enthusiasm gripped me once I was out though, so I ignored the plan entirely and followed the Mourne Wall up to the summit of Slieve Binnian.

The wall was built between 1904 and 1922 to define the boundary of the catchment area for reservoirs created by the Belfast Water Commissioners. It’s an average of 1.5 m high and runs in a loop of 22 miles over 15 mountains, so is quite a structure (and quite a walk/run in one go). I got within a few metres of the summit of Binnian, but the wall hits a cliff and the second I moved out of its cover to find a way around the side I was blown over by the wind. After a similar second attempt I aborted and ran back down to the valley path.

By now the rain was really lashing down, but I was already sufficiently wet that it wasn’t really an issue. It obviously wasn’t bothering the bucketloads of frogspawn that I encountered on my way to Percy Byshe; it seems spring has sprung. Percy Bysshe is marked on the map as a cairn or trig point; all I found was a big rock (it turns out that Percy Bysshe were the forenames of Shelley, although I’m not sure what his link might be with this part of the world?).

I was again battered by the wind as I reached the col past the Blue Lough, and so decided that discretion was the better part of valour and headed home.

It was nice to go somewhere new, and the terrain is great fun to run on. It’s a bit weird having been out for a few hours but still having literally no idea what the hills around there look like; there was very little visibility all day. Still, that seems like a great excuse to go back another time!