Baaaa Baaaa Black Sheep!!!

There are a few things everybody should know about Gouganebarra. Firstly, there used to be - well actually that's not true - there still is a tree where people USED to hammer coins into its trunk for good luck. Why they did this is beyond me. Although it is outside a little Catholic Church so possibly expecting any form of reason is at best a touch misguided!!! However someone has now nailed (ironic I know) a sign stating...'I'm a tree. Do not hammer coins into me'. The amount of questions this type of activity raises are mind numbing. I mean what sort of tree, after years of abuse at the hands of the obviously unlucky, says sod this I've had enough, but I think I'll just bash something else into me for old times sake!!! And how do we take this tree seriously; you're just about to lash in a shiny 2cent coin, you read the notice and stop, but then you start to think just how convinced is the tree that it actually does want all the hammering to end??? Anyway people now throw the coins at the edge of the lake. We made €5.24 on Sunday.....

Secondly, its a little known fact that Gouganebarra has won the Tidy Toilet (pubic toilet section) on two separate occasions. The fact that the toilets seemed to be constantly padlocked is an obvious advantage. I can only assume that they get opened just before judging.....

So anyway we returned to Gouganebarra this Sunday to expel the demons of failure from last weekend. By we I mean me and Ash. Conor was somewhere, Sully was at a wedding getting all sorts of inaccurate information about fitness levels for the climb... We decided to attack it from the other side this time round, coincidentally the trail started at the back of the cleanest toilets in the land, a move that turned out to be inspired. Its bloody well signposted from this side!!!!!!! Those maps we used last week should come with a health warning.... We followed the lovely signs until we met the fenceline on the county bounds, then we followed that. Well we tried to, Ash for some reason kept coming up with very intricate excuses to deviate away from it. All of which lead to varying degrees of disaster. Edmund Hilary he ain't!!!! And when the fence ended we were back where we finished up last week so we knew exactly how to go to get back. Well exactly might be a slight exaggeration....

Of course that still leaves you wondering why this is called Baa Baa Black sheep???? Well, just as we reached the start of the fence line, and just as Ash made his initial attempt to swerve wildly away from it, we heard the sorrowful cries of some distressed animal. Ash recognised it immediately as a 3 year old, left legged, short horned sheep.... So we headed for the sound, and once we got back to the fenceline we found a sheep struggling to free itself from the wire fence!!! So Ash EXPERTLY snuck up on it and grabbed it from behind, while I removed its head from the wire and off it ran. At which point we both said... Ah fuck, never took a picture!!!!