Featured Hike – Glendalough (Derrybawn and the Spinc).

Glendalough sits in the Wicklow Mountains are a range of granite hills a short drive south of Dublin on the east coast of Ireland. Shaped by the glaciers that covered this land more than 12,000 years ago, they are now a series of rounded mountains and ‘U’ shaped valleys that rise to a high point of 940 metres but are more typically 600-800 metres high.

The poor nutrient levels of the thin soils and the dense peat that covers much of the hills, coupled with the high rainfall that leaches out what nutrients remain and forms an impenetrable ‘ironpan’, results in a sparse heathland cover of heather, sedges, bilberries and mosses.