Trip to the Morne mountains

The ideal place to start the trip is the town of Newcastle, located in the Country Down area, south of Belfast. The city has a beautiful central beach and even though it is hardly used for swimming or sunbathing for just a few days a year, it provides beautiful views of the Morne mountains practically all year round.

Immediately after the road leaves the forest, we get a view up to the saddle where we are heading. But before the steep climb begins, we pass the Ice house, which served as a kind of historic freezer, where the locals collected ice from the river.

After climbing from the Ice house you will reach a saddle, which is less than 600m.nm On the left you can climb Slieve Donard, which is the highest mountain in the Morne mountains with its height of 850m.nm To the right then the road continues over the hill Slieve Commedagh further north.

The reward for climbing the saddle is undoubtedly the view of Newcastle and the entire sea bay. Here is an ideal place for a small snack and recharge for the next ascent to the surrounding hills.

In the saddle you will also come across the dominant Morne mountains for the first time and that is the Morne wall. This wall served both to protect water reservoirs against ubiquitous sheep, as well as a kind of hungry wall built by local herders mostly in times of poverty between 1904 and 1922. The wall is about 1.5 meters high, 35 km long and leads over 15 hills.

A one-way route from the saddle to the left leads to the highest mountain in Northern Ireland – Slieve Donard (849 m above sea level). From its top you have a view of the entire Morne mountains and down to the sea and the town of Newcastle.

After reaching the saddle, we turn right and continue north along the wall to Slieve Commedagh, where there is also the only tourist shelter where you can hide in case of suddenly worsening weather. But it's just a really small shelter for barely 3 people. Therefore, it is definitely recommended to equip waterproof and warmer clothes for the trek even in the summer months, because the weather in Ireland is generally very variable and in the mountains this is doubly true.

Another way to get down from the mountains is Tollymore forest park. It happens when Slieve Commedagh follows the wall a little further to the Hares Gap saddle and then steeply down into the valley. The forest park is also crossed by paths, so you can spend a very pleasant day here, wandering among the bushy trees and along the river, which is bridged by historic bridges like in a fairy tale.

Whether you choose any route for a one-day or even multi-day crossing or one of the many climbing areas that climbers of all levels are looking for here, you will definitely be satisfied. The Morne mountains are suitable for all seasons, the only thing that can make the climb complicate is bad weather or much waterlogged terrain after heavy rains.