ALONG THE ROYAL CANAL WAY FROM BROOMBRIDGE TO ASHTOWN

MY WALK FROM BROOMBRIDGE TO ASHTOWN


ALONG THE ROYAL CANAL WAY FROM BROOMBRIDGE TO ASHTOWN

Today I used a Sony NEX-5 which I purchased in 2010.

It is a long time since I used public transport but today I took the tram, which was almost empty, to Broombridge and then walked to Ashtown along the Royal Canal.

Work began on the construction of the 146 km long Royal Canal, to connect Ireland’s capital city, Dublin, with the upper River Shannon in 1790, and the canal was completed in 1817.

It operated in competition with the Grand Canal which ran an almost parallel route never more than 30 km to the south, and with the Grand, was made redundant by the advent of the railways in the mid-19th century.

The canal was officially closed to all navigation in 1961, but like the Grand Canal, much of the Royal has been restored in recent decades, and the Royal Canal Way currently follows grassy towpaths, gravel and sometimes tarmac canal-side roads from the Dublin suburb of Ashtown 105 kilometres to the village of Abbeyshrule in County Longford.

Some sections of tow path can be muddy. Further restoration will take the navigable canal and the walking route all the way to the Shannon. There is a good range of options for overnight accommodation along most of the route: it is, however, relatively easy to walk some sections and return to your starting point by public transport. Apart from the glorious, linear cordon of unspoilt countryside the route provides, there are a number of significant examples of late-eighteenth century industrial archaeology to admire along the way, including the Ryewater Aquaduct which takes the canal high over the Rye river, and which took six years to build.


Because of travel restrictions here in Dublin I have lots of time to spare so I am working my way through my collection of old cameras in order to see if they still work. Today it was the Sony NEX-5 which was my first mirrorless camera.

Much to my surprise it is still working and even the date and time was correct even though it has been idle for many years.

The Sony α NEX-5 is a digital camera launched on 11 May 2010. It is a mirrorless interchangeable lens camera with the body size of a larger model fairly compact point-and-shoot camera with a larger sensor size (APS-C) comparable to that of some digital single-lens reflex cameras. Its major competitors in the market are the cameras based on the micro 4/3 standard created by Panasonic and Olympus, and a few low end Canon, Nikon, and even Sony α DSLRs.The NEX-5 shoots 14.2 megapixel stills and has a 7 frame/s continuous shot mode. It has the capability to shoot 1920×1080i at 60 frame/s in AVCHD or 1440×1080p at 30 frame/s in MPEG4. The NEX-5 was replaced by the 16 megapixel NEX-5N in August 2011.

ALONG THE ROYAL CANAL WAY FROM BROOMBRIDGE TO ASHTOWN
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