A Different View with Dave O’Connell

There’s a little gem of a walk on the east side of Galway city that sort of meanders through some of the busiest routes in and out of town.

It’s hard to walk the entire length of this path through Terryland Forest Park because you would have to negotiate several encounters with oncoming traffic – but any little section is enough to take you away from the hustle and bustle and into an urban oasis.

One portion of this path borders our Tribune home in Liosban Business Park – a five or six-minute stroll that starts at the Nox Hotel and ends up in the industrial estate itself.

It was recently extended by around 100 yards so that the entrance is now just past the hotel as opposed to around the corner.

This was all part of the concerted effort to remove the so-called kissing gates – originally installed with the very good motive of keeping scramblers out of the park by limiting their access, but ultimately frustrating those with buggies or mobility issues from using the path as well.

So now the gates are gone, and we have this little extra oasis of sylvian paradise to walk through to fool yourself into thinking that you’re not yards away from the main Galway/Dublin dual carriageway.

The short new stretch is perfectly tarmacked with black tar; it’s billiard table flat and a joy to walk on – and I can’t wait until it gets old, mossy and cracked like the rest of the path.

There was no way of doing it so that it would age automatically; that only happens with the passage of time.

But the contrast can only be compared to the old days when you crossed the border into Northern Ireland – and the roads changed from awful to pristine in the blink of an eye.

The old section was presumably once flat and black too, but the years have seen the roots of trees rise up through the cracks; the black has gone a mossy green to blend in with the wild grass and tall trees on either side of it.

It has evolved into nothing more than a more solid surface that the grass, disguised by nature into a woodland path.