South to the Coast at Tramore

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10/06/2012 Heading South (and it’s not raining !)

As soon as we left the campsite we looked for fuel, as the Tandy tank was pretty empty. It is frightening to pay €100 for a few litres of liquid gold but at least our mpg is quite good so won’t need to fill up again for a while.

Once away from the city we took the Old Military Road, R115, through the heart of the Wicklow Mountains. This leads over a quite wild moorland area of mainly peat bogs – we could see all round us, where the peat sods had been cut out. The road surface was pretty awful so we didn’t do this stretch of the trip very fast.

The next section of the drive was also slow in places as we were taking the same route as the Wexford 200, a cycle race and got caught up behind and sometimes inside it. This was downright nerve-racking at times as the road was quite narrow and winding but the cyclists took no care at all of vehicles either behind or coming towards them and rode along 2, 3 and sometimes 4 abreast even overtaking each other as we were passing them. Goodness knows if they all made it home !

Our main stop en route for the south coast was at Glendalaugh, a 6^th century abbey with a 100 ft Round Tower still virtually untouched from when it was built in the 12^th century. We were not the only ones visiting today, it seems that this area in the Wexford National Park is a magnet for walkers and being a Sunday there were plenty about as well as families and several coachfuls of tourists. We were lucky we arrived early enough to find a parking spot for the Tandy and had a very pleasant walk through the woods to the Lower Lake, marred only by a lot of midgies along the way.

We stopped briefly in New Ross, a port on the river, as the guidebook said good things about it. There is a rather fine looking ancient sailing boat moored on the river, the Dunbrody, known as a famine ship as it carried lots of Irish emigrants to America. The buildings along the river frontage however were all dilapidated and closed. We continued on our journey.

Waterford was a possible stopping spot but that was tricky as the car parks were height barriered which is a bit of a problem in a 2.9 metre high motorhome.

So straight through we drove until we came to the south coast at Tramore and on to our very nice campsite.

After dinner, still no rain and really rather pleasant, so we took a walk from the campsite down to a little cove which has a swimming area built up to the edge of the rocks. We decided not to swim, it looked absolutely freezing. Some young and hardy locals were swimming and diving in and said it was good but they were wearing wetsuits. The walk through the woods, following a stream, down to the cove was lovely, with undisturbed luxuriant foliage on both sides and some quite lovely bird song.

We were hopeful of spotting some of the little people as it seemed just the place they might be but they were hiding.

Newtown Cove Camping Caravan Park - which we rate 8.5 out of 10.

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