Cuilcagh is a mountain on the borders of Counties Cavan and Fermanagh. Standing at 666m tall, it has a distinctive plateau shape, with steep walls climbing up to a long, flat summit area. Our sights were first set on this mountain as part of our high points project, where Carl and I look to climb to the highest point of every county in Ireland. Cuilcagh counts for two counties - Cavan and Fermanagh. However, over the past few years the area of Cuilcagh has become famous for a new, man-made feature: the stairway to heaven.

I think, to talk about this highpoint is to talk about a few different things, things that Carl and I have been learning over the past several years. When we started walking all of Ireland’s National Waymarked Trails in 2017, we were naive, young trail wanderers, heading off on an adventure that we thought would only take six months.

Over 4,000km and many years later (it’s 2021), we can no longer go blindly. Many of the mountains we will look to climb will have their own unique issues and considerations.

Such as Cuilcagh.

Cuilcagh is home to a large blanket bog - which admittedly, to Irish eyes, can look like a fairly familiar and unremarkable thing. However, as an environmental habitat, it is an increasingly rare and precious thing. Because of this, Cuilcagh is a Special Area of Conservation (SAC) and is being lovingly restored. Alongside this, there has been a trail up Cuilcagh for quite some time. Several years ago, the issue of human impacts on the bog from this trail were noted. And through a series of events, the large boardwalk that stands there today was built, the intention being that it would help mitigate the human impact.

One viral video later, and Cuilcagh has gone from seeing around 3,000 people per year, to over 100,000 visitors between March and September in 2021. At first, the top of the boardwalk was open, and people would regularly get lost on the mountain top due to the heavy clouds that can blow across the plateau at any time. Huge scares of trails criss crossed the summit, and litter left along the boardwalk became more and more of an issue. Further work has been done, and a viewing platform now contains visitors at the top of the route, with the hope of minimising further damage.

The tricky thing about the outdoors, is that as more people live in urban spaces, easy to access, famous outdoor places are a necessary part of the cycle for helping people to experience, and then fall in love with our many different outdoor environments. Once people can experience the magic of the outdoors, they become protectors of it.

I think, the problem from my experience of Cuilcagh, is that it doesn’t facilitate that falling in love. It’s a gravel road and a short boardwalk, through a landscape that is only famous because of the marks we have made on it.

People go to see the “Stairway to Heaven”, not the mountain it is built on. The battle with Cuilcagh is that it is an increasingly popular place, because this white line across the landscape is so visual. If you look at that white line while walking, it is certainly interesting. However, as soon as you hold a camera in front of it, it almost becomes mesmerising, this snake of white across the dark bog.

When we walked the boardwalk we didn’t want to add to the damage from this side, so we walked to the viewing platform and then turned around and walked back. What many people don’t realise is that the photos you see from the top of the boardwalk looking down at the trail - is that most of that white snake is a gravel road, not twisting boardwalk.

We reached the summit of Cuilcagh a month later, when walking a section of the Ulster Way. This trail approached the peak from the north east, and was an intense scramble that we can only recommend to very experienced hill walkers. We touched the summit while engulfed in clouds, cold and wet and windswept.

As I said at the summit, we’ve now been up this mountain two ways, and neither felt quite like the right way.

I understand that it is easy for me to say that there are many more beautiful walks out there - I’ve had the amazing experience of seeing them, and being there, and experiencing some of the best places this island has. Unfortunately, the way Cuilcagh is now, I find it hard to know if people can fall in love with it the same way.

If you are going up the boardwalk, try to avoid peak times, be gentle to the bog land around you, and bring all rubbish home with you, including food waste.

The above is the script I wrote for our video about summiting Cuilcagh. It’s based off of two voice notes that I sent Carl while out running as I thought about how best to share our experience of the mountain, and the discourse around it. The voice notes vary only slightly from the final script (minus the heavy breathing of someone trying to record ideas while out on a 10k).

A comparison I didn’t end up making in the video is between Cuilcagh and Glendalough in Co. Wicklow. Both are very popular places - and both have a boardwalk. However, the boardwalk in Glendalough (The Spinc), isn’t the main attraction - it’s walked because of the amazing views it offers of Glendalough. As I said above, to me it seems that Cuicagh’s boardwalk is walked for the boardwalk, not the mountain.

(Of course, this is not saying that the Glendalough boardwalk has not had its own problems, it’s just an example of what people are focused on; mountain or man-made).

Some useful resources and reading around this topic include:

Helen Lawless of Mountaineering Ireland, "Much to be learned from experience at Cuilcagh": http://www.mountaineering.ie/_files/2018125165027_89659124.pdf (Winter 2017)
Helen Lawless “Learning from Cuilcagh”: https://www.mountaineering.ie/_files/202043173513_8ac893a4.pdf (Winter 2019, pg. 56)
Helen Lawless, "Shaping the Future of Ireland's Mountains & Upland Areas": http://www.mountaineering.ie/_files/2018125165120_a7c3a75d.pdf (Summer 2017)
Many more of Helen's articles are published in Mountaineering's publication, "The Irish Mountain Log", under Access and Conservation.
John G O'Dwyer for the Irish Times, "Rising number of walkers threatens Irish mountains": https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/travel/ireland/rising-number-of-walkers-threatens-irish-mountains-1.3553601
If you want to get very nerdy, you can look into:
- Contested Terrain: Differing Interpretations of Co. Wicklow's Landscape by Eamonn Slater
- Against the Anthropocene by T.J. Demos