Last Saturday, I had six hours to kill between an airport pickup and an airport drop-off. I thought about what I could do with our friends from Lithuania, to give them a taste of Ireland. I didn’t want to take them into the city – that’s one version of Ireland, and we’d done that earlier in the week. I thought Howth might be nice. And then a friend suggested the Howth Cliff Walk. I’d never heard of it, but my friend had done it a couple of times and had only good things to say about it. So, I did a bit of research, saw that the car park where we could start the walk was less than 30 minutes from the airport, and decided on that for our ‘taste of Ireland’ day out.

I’d only been to Howth once before, years ago on the Dart with Julian, and then only for about an hour. There were a number of routes we could take on the cliff walk and, after consultation with the girls and our visitors, we decided to tackle the longest and most difficult walk – the 3 hour, 12km Bog of the Frogs walk. And what a walk it was.

I couldn’t have imagined that there would be such a varied rural landscape so close to the city. I mainly took photos along the coastal portion – as we walked along the coastal path on top of the cliffs, with yachts from a sailing club flying past and practicing manoeuvres, a fishing boat dropping lobster pots, and herring gulls, kittiwakes and cormorants swooping high or flying low over the sea. At times, the grey sea blended into the grey sky, creating a mesmerizing horizonless seascape.

At lunchtime, we wound our way down to a small stony beach and, after a delicious picnic (if I do say so myself), we quickly changed into our swimsuits for a quick dip in the sea. The water was warm and we all could have stayed there all day. But we were only half way through the walk and our friends had a plane to catch to Lithuania in a few hours.

The path soon brought us away from the sea, up through birch woods and then up the side of a hill overlaid with blanket bog and heather. That took some effort and, for twenty minutes or so, we barely spoke – our chatty group focused now on getting up the hill and controlling our breathing. But that ended too and then, after a brief foray across a busy golf course, it was downhill all the way and back, once again, into the middle of Howth village.

It was a delightful day out. Just the perfect weather for a walk, a swim, a picnic. The other walkers we met were friendly and chatty. And, despite advice to the contrary on the cliff walk website, the trail was clearly and frequently marked.

I think it would be lovely to do it again.