Go Walk: Ballycrystal circuit, Blackstairs Mountains, Co Wexford

Last week a valued companion finally gave up the ghost. Admittedly, I had lately noticed my white mouse was a bit stiff getting around, but this sudden demise nevertheless left me feeling decidedly bereft.

Unable to cope without a mouse in the house, I headed back to the shop, remains dangling between finger and thumb. The assistant was sympathetic but shook her head and said these days such mice were ever so last century. People now preferred multicoloured varieties that moved about silently and didn't continually ingest fluff balls.

So here I am with my new silver-and-green cordless mouse sitting on the desktop before me, which is great news. I can process words efficiently again and thereby indulge my favourite compulsions: exploring the hills and then telling people what summit I've been up.

Some people treat memorable mountain experiences like the last secret of Fatima, but I am not among them. And so I feel a familiar urge: I want to share my recent experience of ascending the Blackstairs Mountains from the captivating Ballycrystal Valley, on the Wexford-Offaly border.

The Blackstairs are vertically unassuming mountains that don't make people feel insignificant or out of place. So it was in good spirits that I left my parking place in Ballycrystal on a sunny day and continued through a gate and up along a rough track through open mountain. At an isolated trio of trees I turned right and began ascending for the col between Mount Leinster and Knockroe.

On a good day, with the sun in your face and the breeze at your back, time simply vanishes. And so it was in what seemed no time at all that I was on the summit ridge. To the west shower clouds were giddily chasing each other, but luckily none came visiting.

I swung right along the broad crest and soon after was approaching Mount Leinster - the biggest cheese in the Blackstairs' modest mountain larder. When the summit finally yielded itself I ended up standing incongruously beside an obtrusively unblended mountaintop mast while gazing, by contrast, on a deeply alluring landscape misting into the distant hills. Lugnaquillia, the Slieve Blooms, the Devil's Bit, the Galtees and the Comeraghs were all laid out at the edge of the serene tablecloth below me. When the time came to descend I followed a benign ridge towards the east top of Mount Leinster and then continued towards Black Rock Mountain.

As I rambled pleasantly eastwards I couldn't help thinking about the fate of the TV mast when continually advancing satellite technology renders it obsolete. Will it then be dismantled and the mountaintop returned to its former pristine state? Or will it be regarded as having somehow served its time and become sufficiently integrated into the conscious landscape to earn its keep as an eye- grabbing monument to cruder past technologies?

At a low point of the ridge, before the minor reascent of Black Rock, I came upon a stone-built turf-cutter's hut that offered an ideal lunch stop, with a pastoral vista across Co Wexford to the dancing light of the southern ocean. Once replenished I descended a sympathetic path that contoured downwards, left, from the hut to eventually enter a forestry plantation by a wooden gate.

Later, at a T-junction, I took a right and carried on downhill while being careful not to miss the track when it again swung sharply right. The trail became obvious once it exited the forest and continued past a yellow metal barrier to reach a minor tarmac road.

Swinging right, it was just a serene two and a half kilometre ramble back to my parking place. Indeed, such was the uninterrupted serenity that I came to the unshakeable conclusion that if the mythical hidden Ireland of countless Fáilte Ireland blurbs truly exists, then Ballycrystal is one of its foremost examples.