Down by the river: the pleasures of a bankside stroll

Five regular hikers, Olivia O'Leary, Liam Lysaght, Sinéad O'Brian, Mark Boyden and David Staunton -- share the joys, and pains, of their favourite riverside walking routes

We have been drawn to rivers since long before the dawn of history.

We were attracted to watercourses for their obvious and essential gifts of food and rapid transport, which made them favoured sites for settlements. But perhaps we were also drawn to them for many less tangible but still vital benefits, so that we continue to delight in walking alongside, or kayaking within, their flowing waters today.

Ireland’s exceptional river wealth is rightly celebrated, from the feisty mountain trout streams that inspired WB Yeats’s “wise and simple” fisherman, to the majesty of the Liffey, reflecting the lives of myriad Dubliners in the work of James Joyce.

Our rivers often retain fragments of natural beauty lost in surrounding agricultural and urban intensification. Yet they are also inevitable conduits for the detritus of the catchments they drain, barometers of the health or sickness of our landscapes. So a riverside walk can be a source of both pleasure and pain to the observant walker or kayaker, as is evident from these reflections by five people who spend a lot of time down by the river.

This article first appeared in The Irish Times on 9 December 2017. Read the full piece here.