Met Eireann (Ireland’s Meteorological Service) define an absolute drought as 15 consecutive days where no rainfall above 0.1 mm is recorded in one of its weather stations. Ireland passed into drought condition last weekend, forcing Galway County Council to bring in restrictions on water use. As it happened, I was hiking in the Twelve Bens mountain range when the drought period began and just before it ended. Even though the weather in Galway (city and the east of the county had been sunny and dry for 3-4 days beforehand, July 7th was the first dry day in a while in the Bens. When I returned there last Sunday, the area was a day away from becoming an official drought area.
The Glencoaghan (Gleann Chóchan) river runs the entire length of the mountain valley from Bencollaghduff mountain into Ballynahinch lake, but on Sunday morning, there wasn’t much of a river to run anywhere. Most of it was dry and it looked like a footpath. The Bens consists of white quartzite stone, which shatters and breaks from big rocks to smaller rocks due to the remorseless action of rain and ice. And slowly but surely, the river will carry those stones, one by one, down to the lake. Apart from the odd time when it doesn’t rain.