Go explore, wander and be free! I always have painted Sligo to be a bit of a doom and gloom town, but my mind has been changed as of 3rd of June, 2018.

We have previously planned a trip to Benbulbin, but unfortunately, The Beast from the East landed and we cancelled the trip. 

We decided we would finally re-visit Benbulbin yesterday, I previously mapped a route so all I had to do the day before is make sure that the offline map was on my phone and drive to the starting point. If you wish to follow my route at some point, just click on the link here. 

TIP: I use ViewRanger for mapping and planning routes, just in case any of are looking for a good way to plan your trips, I normally map the route on the PC on a nice big screen and you can download the route/offline map to your phone afterwards

As we arrived in Sligo town, Benbulbin looked a little doom and gloom as the top of it was all covered by a thick cloud. So bets were on for a sunny vs cloudy hike. I ended up losing :D the day ended up being one of the most sunny days ever.

We started by parking at Lukes Bridge, it is a fairly small car park, ended up parking at the side of the road, but as we started walking towards our hike starting point, we discovered there is another bridge, with enough space for another few cars. So if you find Luke's bridge is full, drive a little further up and you will get a space up there.

The route to Benbulbin is straightforward and the views on top are amazing. Some people said that there's not a whole lot up there, I would happily prove them wrong. We covered the 3 mountains in the Darty mountain range,which took us around 10 hours at a leisurely pace and the views on a sunny clear day are amazing, mind you shooting in harsh sunlight is not ideal, but we had a good mix of sun and clouds to make some of the photos look nice and dynamic.

As mentioned, start of at Luke's Bridge and follow the path the leads between a small little waterfall, there's a route right along the side of it, its a bit of push to get up, but once you're at the top, its all flat and easy to walk around.

After you visit Benbulbin and take in the views, move down to Kings Mountain. If you've had enough at that point, you can follow my route, which will take you back down the stream and back to the car park. 

Once we got to the top we got a little greedy and we wanted to head off to Benwiskin mountain top, which is fair distance away from our starting point, but we decided to stick with it. That's where things got a little more difficult, serious of ups and down pushed us down to the limit, by the time we got to the peak of Benwiskin, most of us were exhausted and running out of water.
We had ran out of water previously already, we had to resort to a mountain spring to refill and hope there was no nasty bacteria hiding, we are OK today, so looks like that worked out to our favour, plus the spring was nice and cool and was so refreshing :)

The way down from Benwiskin was a bit of a free for all, we didn't fancy trekking back to our original route, and on the way to Benwiskin there was a nice and easy slope to get off, so while it was fairly shrubby, it was dry, so made the decent stable and easy going.
We passed a couple of bogs on the way back to the car park, and behold, we were eventually delighted to end up back at Luke's bridge and get the boots off!

We started our hike at 11:15, we got back to the car at 20:45.
Seeing as we still had a bit of time, we stopped in Texaco on the way back into Sligo to re-fill our stomachs, got some Ice Cream and headed off to Strandhill for some ice cream while watching the sunset. Sun ended up hiding behind the clouds, and only re-appeared for a brief moment as in the picture below, so we finished up the ice cream and got back in the car to go home.

All in Benbulbin is definitely a recommended adventure location, the hike to Benbulbin and back is straight forward, and you don't have to be extremely fit to reach it, but if you plan to cover the 3 peaks on the range, you definetly are better of doing a little bit of training and bringing plenty of water with you.