Mountain vistas brings transcendental calm

Another Life: 'It's quite possible that things could soon get a whole lot better for walking in this country," says the spring issue of Walking World Ireland, replete, as usual, with stirring photographs framed on the island's heights. It was written after the sorely-needed Supreme Court decision that put risk back where it belongs - on the walker, not the landowner - but just before 33 well-trodden ramblers' routes in the Wicklows were deleted from the county development plan.

The conflict will be sorted, as farmers' amour propre and territorial claims are assuaged, but not before Ireland's protestations of welcome for the walking visitor have taken yet another knock. Perhaps stacks of free copies of a new book by Paul Clements should be sent to all our tourist desks abroad.

The Height of Nonsense (Collins Press, 13.95) is a timely reminder that most farmers in most places are far from bloody-minded - at least towards an amiable, solitary walker. Circumnavigating Ireland in 2002 in search of the highest point in each county, Clements found (or rather, sought out) only one farmer who denied the hospitality of his land. Even then, as it happened, the volatile "Bull McSharry" of Benwiskin, Co Sligo, happened to be out when he called, leaving his many signs to shout in his absence.

Ireland attracts this sort of venture, being of manageable size and variety. Clements, a BBC journalist in Belfast, has already written of a journey round its shores; someone else did it with a refrigerator; I did it on my bike, 25 years ago.

This "ultimate Irish road trip", as the book jacket calls it, was made in the comparative comfort of an elderly Nissan Bluebird, still well able to mount the mountain boreens and bog roads that wind within striking distance of the summits.

Some of these roads proved, indeed, "a triumph of engineering over sanity", as in the miles of vertiginous hairpins that delivered Clements, with sweating hands and thudding heart, at the Priest's Leap, first stage on the ascent of Knockboy in west Cork.

He was rewarded with what is clearly the most thrilling mountain vista in Ireland - range after range of peaks and ridges travelling the horizon in an awesome, unpeopled circle. It enfolded him for hours in a total silence, a "transcendental level of calm".

Such crystal stillness was not always his lot. My own mountain, Mweelrea, which he climbed heroically on the steepest side, from sea-level to a summit at 2,688 feet (Clements rightly sticks to feet: metres are not high enough) smothered him in wind-whipped cloud; Galtymore, too, tried to tear him apart. Far more modest ascents - shared, perhaps, with a mobile phone mast or a television booster station - come to stick in the mind from Clements's gift for mood and detail of the view: tranquil vignettes of distant tractors and white vans, washing flapping on a line, men burning bracken in a field.

Such peaceful contemplations count for quite as much as the book's entertaining, often wicked, anecdotage from the 8,000 miles of mountain outings, pub evenings, visitor centres and B&Bs. They make it a good partner for another new book about travels in the Irish countryside, totally different in origin and style but moved by the same appreciation of "deep, tremendous restfulness that flowed into the soul".

In Irish Waterways (Currach Press, 12.99) is a "little" book whose title alone suggests another, less febrile, age. Its author, Edward O'Regan, started work in 1934, so work it out. It records some seven trips made in a collapsible canoe, from 1939 onwards, in a half-empty Ireland without cars or petrol, but with steam-trains that got there eventually.

They delivered him to rivers, lakes and canals where virtually the only sounds were those of water, fish and birds. Snapshots add black-and-white atmosphere.

The trips were written up some years later, often quite beautifully, and recalling what it was to be young and golden, with a trusty companion of equal years, in an unpolluted idyll. Somewhere on the Shannon, "above the sandy shore, was a carpet of soft, thick grass, sprinkled with moss-grown stones, and this riparian strip ran for 30 yards or so in a gentle incline into the wood. Here, some 100 yards within, we found a little glade, sheltered on all sides by the encircling oak, smooth as a golfing green and ablaze with daisies. In this secret place we set up camp, breaking the silence almost in awe. . ."

It's a classic, as Dick Warner says in his preface. Young Edward even went hunting with a serious bow-and-arrow. One has, however, to be sorry about the badger.