Walk 7: The Bray-Greystones Cliff Walk

Maggie is suffering through a fairly challenging week of final exams. It is interesting because I think the exams are, perhaps, a bit more stringent than at home. They seem to cover more material and are set up much more like final exams in high school or college. This week she only needs to show up at school when she has exams, and pretty much spends the rest of the time studying. Wednesday, however, she had no exams and I talked Sheila (her task master) into giving her a few hours off so that we could do the Bray-Greystones Cliff walk together.

The walk is about 7 kilometers (I think that includes travel from one DART station to the other in the two adjacent villages of Greystones and Bray. The grade is "moderate" and it is expected to take 2 hours and 30 minutes. Here's what the Braysians say on their tourist site: "The Cliff Walk is a linear walk between Bray and Greystones, following the train line along the cliffs of Bray Head. This well maintained walk offers stunning and dramatic views along steep cliffs into the Irish Sea. Take one of the many trains to get back to your starting point."

We drove to Greystones and took the DART to Bray with the following agenda: get to Greystones and have lunch before we have to get back home to haircuts and Johnny who was heading over to his friend Christina's after school.

We started at about 1 p.m.

 

You can walk from either Bray to Greystones, or vice versa, or you could go both ways! We decided to go to Greystones as Sheila had read about a café called "Three Q's"*



Both directions have their perks. Toward Bray I suppose you could begin to see Dalkey Island and Howth. Away its all the sea and, to our great luck, the sun**.

It starts out on a long promenade along Bray--the very place where the kids rode rides while Liz, Julia and Sophie were here over St. Patricks day (which seems like ages ago now....).

 

There is an initial hill up toward the Bray head where Maggie, Johnny and I walked while Barb and Paul were here,*** but that was really the steepest part of the walk. The rest of it was fairly flat with stunning views over the cliffs and out toward the sea. 

You can see the rail for the dart below the wall of the walk.

 

Signs along the way alerted us as to how far we had gone and how far we had to go.

 



 

Check out the birds nesting in the cliffs.

Here are Sheila and Maggie along the wall ahead of me.

Looking back you can see Dalkey (the little tip of the Dublin Bay to the north). That little tiny white line that you can see is Dalkey terrace and used to be one of the  most expensive pieces of real estate in Dublin and I think that Neil Jordan currently lives there.

Here is Maggie taking in the strong coconut smell of the gorse that was running rampant all over the hill.

 

Check out the stunning cliffs.

 

Getting closer.

 

Here is the Greystones beach we were hoping to see!

 

 

The Greystones village a bit closer. 

The last bit of the trail was pretty uninteresting as it was not along the coast and we were, at that point, just trying to get to the restaurant on time in order to make it back. But when I looked back and saw from where we had come, I was stunned. And check out the blooming gorse all over the hill.

 

All in all only an hour and a half.

And our reward.****

*This place could not be more darling. Firstly, open that link and see the three brothers who own and operate it. Lovely. Secondly, what's there not to love about the reference in the name (I assume) to Leo Tolstoy's book The Three Questions (a favorite of mine. I used to read a kids version of it to Johnny!).

**It was so sunny and warm (it was probably between 65 and 70 degrees and, right up by the sea it felt even a bit chillier than that) that when we told our friend Susan that we had done the walk we got an email from her that said "You did the walk today?! Wow! It's a warm day, for us anyway, so you guys must be wrecked." As an aside, I need to explain these friends of ours that keep popping up in the blog as of late. Here's the deal. Sheila went to high school with a gal named Kathy Fabian. Kathy met Mike Dean and they got married and then spent a semester in Dublin where he studied business. There Mike met Ed (a charming Irishman) and his wife Susan. Though Sheila and Kathy are somewhat out of touch, Sheila had reached out to her for advice about where to live knowing they had lived in South Dublin. Kathy put us in touch with Ed and Susan. Back in January or February we literally cold called them and practically hoisted ourselves to their house as we were lonely. Their family is awesome -- four kids (three boys and one girl), all precocious and interesting, and up for anything. Our only regret is getting to know them later in our trip and having no natural overlap. Their kids go to Irish school and play hurling for a different team.

***By the way, this should be "Walk  2." I realized that I wrote a post for Walk 2 but never actually posted it. Alas.

****If you want more photos check out this Youtube video of the walk posted by someone else.