The Neverending Cliff Walk Story?

Away we go…?

e’ve grown wary of reporting on the seemingly neverending calls for our beloved Cliff Walk to reopen when, in truth, there’s been nothing new to report for three years now.

Every few months, a councillor or two bangs the drum, gets their pic taken by a padlocked gate on Wicklow’s finest seafront trek, and then, well, nothing…

The walk has become dangerous due to collapses along Bray Head, and negotiations to move parts of it further inland and secure rock faces have been in full swing for three years now.

One of the main hold-ups being some of the landowners getting solicitors involved, to ensure that they get as good a deal as possible from Wicklow County Council. Not only does land need to be purchased, but the types of farming have to be changed in some cases to reduce water erosion along the coast.

Greystones town engineer Ruairi O’Hanlon managed to whittle down those negotiations from 4 to 2 landowners, pointing out to us that one old farmer was kind enough to give the go ahead automatically, stating that “we’ll sort out the legal stuff later“. We clearly need more people like him around here.

The latest round of talks took place at the recent Bray Municipal District July meeting, with councillors arguing that this major Wicklow attraction should be afforded the same amount of care and attention as Glendalough.

The latest attempt at speeding up the process was the call for a new committee dedicated to reopening The Cliff Walk, the duo of councillors Stephen Stokes and Joe Behan’s Bray To Greystones Cliff Walk Committee having failed to make any real progress.

This new committee, it was argued, should drill down into who exactly the stakeholders are, and what a masterplan would look like, the aim being to look for long-term solutions rather than short-term fixes.

There’s little doubt that any such committee will have their work cut out for them. A tender to secure the cliff face after a rock slide in 2022 only received one applicant, and it proved to be far too expensive.

Three more tenders have now been received, with Bray’s district engineer Liam Bourke stating that he was “optimistic that it is something we could make a business case for“.

And should that all prove successful, that still only fixes the Bray end of The Cliff Walk. At the Greystones end, it’s still a case of temporary bypasses taking people away from the coastline trek, with many detours from Darcy’s Park on one side to Raheen car park on the other.

One idea floated was the Guide’s own April’s Fool joke – adding a series of bridges at trouble spots along the walk. It’s something that has worked around the world, including Gobbins Walk in Antrim.

For her part, Green Party councillor Erika Doyle stated, “Any notion we have has to be mindful of rising sea levels and extreme weather events. These are happening, and we can’t make a fanciful plan without being aware of the reality of the grim future coastal locations are facing…”

You can jump back through our Cliff Walk archives right here, and send your ideas on how to save our tourist lifeline on the back of a million euro note to the usual address.