If you already know why I made the switch and just want to know how I got on, you can skip ahead.

Why the switch?

I've discussed the reasons I switched on Mastodon, but I'll rehash them here quickly (probably not all that quickly, knowing me).

I've been using #Apple devices for over 20 years. I like the UI, the build quality, the way things “just work” (less reliably than they used to, but still). They definitely cost more, but they generally look nicer and are better thought-out (with a few exceptions), and in my experience, they last longer before you need to replace them. My first iPhone was a 3GS and I hadn't used another type of phone since 2009.

But in January 2025 I felt physically sick at the idea of supporting Tim Cook's Apple given how he began sucking up to the current administration of the US Government. It started with a personal donation from him to the inauguration (presumably so it didn't come from Apple directly but still, gross) and then there was a parade of sycophantic dinners and that horrendous glass and gold trophy or whatever it is...

I absolutely get that they're all as bad as each other; #Google and Meta and Amazon and everyone else donated, they're all playing the game. I didn't expect any better from them, though. As an ex-Apple employee and a longtime user, I hoped Apple would make a stand. They have buttloads of money in the bank. Apple has always been a pro-LGBT+ company. Tim Cook is a gay man, I hoped he would be as repulsed and furious as I was when I saw the policy changes stripping minorities of rights and protections and rewarding hatred and division and xenophobia. Oh well.

So, I made the decision to stop giving Apple any money while Tim Cook is in charge.

I moved all my data (email, messages, contacts, calendars, reminders, notes, files, photos, music) away from their servers, I stopped using any Apple subscriptions apart from some storage for iCloud backups (yes I could backup manually to a computer but that's not realistically gonna happen) and I resolved not to buy an iPhone the next time I needed to upgrade my hardware.

I know they don't care. I know it's a drop in the ocean to Tim Cook and Apple. It's a non-event.

But I feel so much better knowing I have no reliance on them at all for my data.

The Switch

In November 2025, my contract on my 2 year old iPhone was up, and I decided to get a new phone. It still worked, but my mom needed a “new” one and so I figured I'd get a new one and she could have mine.

I considered my options but realistically my only choice was an #Android device. If you want to be able to use banking apps and function in society, you have to use either iOS or Android these days.

I ruled out Google hardware; I might have to use Google software but I don't have to give them a chunk of cash for a device. And besides, there are more interesting options out there.

I was tempted by the high-end OnePlus phones, they have great specs and look good and have really good cameras, but in the end I went with a Motorola Razr 60 Ultra. I was swayed by nostalgia and novelty; I had the original Razr back in the day, and I loved it – it was so impossibly slim, and I always loved being able to hang up on someone by snapping the phone shut. One of my gripes with modern phones is the size – I had an iPhone 12 Mini and I loved it, just wish it had a better camera. The modern Razr when folded closed isn't as slim as the original but it's still compact, the front screen is way more functional and when unfolded the inner display is taller than an iPhone.

I ordered the “Mountain Trail” version, because I liked the look of the wooden panel on the back of the phone. It really is gorgeous, but unfortunately I never see it because I bought a case. I hadn't planned on getting a case for it, I wanted to keep it as slim as possible since it's already double-thick compared to an iPhone, but when it arrived I was slightly horrified to realise the metal sides are shiny rose gold. In the promo photos it looks more matte beige, similar to the raw titanium iPhones, I was not expecting that at all. I'm secure in my masculinity but it's really not my style.

That's beside the point really, this isn't a review of the phone. Initial setup was easy enough to get me started with calls and messages, and I was excited to play with my new toy!

Pros and cons

So, what do I like about my Android phone? And what annoys me? Some of these things are specific to me and my way of doing things, some of them are specific to this device, some are general Android. I haven't sorted them into any real order, they're just as they occurred to me.

Pros

1 – Hardware and Flip Format

The Razr 60 Ultra is a premium device. It was expensive. The build quality is great, it has a bit of weight, I love the external screen, the hinge mechanism is smooth, the fold in the middle of the inside screen is all but invisible, and on the rare occasion I actually use it to make a call, hanging up is a satisfying “snap”.

With the external screen, you get a camera preview visible when you're taking a selfie with the main camera. Really handy! You can open the phone at 90 degrees and sit it on a table or whatever and take a photo either with the timer or a hand gesture.

And you can open any app on the external screen. Not all of them are very usable on such a small screen, the keyboard takes up most of it if you need to type something, but it's definitely handy sometimes – it's a great bedside clock, it shows notifications, it's good for shopping lists and boarding cards and loyalty cards. I really like the form-factor.

2 – Home Screen Customisation

This was one of the things I was most excited about; everyone talks about how restrictive iOS is and how you can customise Android so much more. When I first got the phone I installed twelfty billion widgets and icon packs and set them all up on different pages and murdered my battery running so many at once and... it was a bit underwhelming. It was still a grid of icons and widgets exactly like iOS, just different shapes and fonts, really. Not exactly mindblowing.

But then I discovered launchers – completely redesigned home screens that replace the built in Android UI. I played with a few and settled on Niagara launcher. Took a bit of messing but I made myself a home screen I really like, very different to iOS or stock Android. It gives me a lovely clean minimal layout on a single page, with quick access to my most used apps, a sideways swipe on those shortcuts gives me access to a few more apps (or links to specific contacts etc within those apps), and dragging down the side of the screen lets me browse all the other apps alphabetically. The top section is for widgets, and the calendar widget I'm using has tappable hotspots to give me access to calendar or alarm clock (different apps) depending on where I tap.

3 – “Better” NFC

Most people probably wouldn't care about this one, but on Android you can tap an NFC tag and have stuff happen without unlocking your phone or confirming anything. I use Home Assistant, which has support for NFC tags. I have a few dotted around the house, and with an iPhone, if you tap an NFC tag you've created yourself (as opposed to transit terminals etc) you have to unlock your phone before whatever action you've programmed will run, a policy choice from Apple to improve security. Android lets you just tap and it works. A much better experience. But arguably less secure.

4 – More “Hackable”

Again, most people probably don't care about this but it's trivially simple to install “unsanctioned” apps on an Android phone (for now). This is great if you're careful but I can only imagine how many idiots have installed dodgy versions of apps and had their card info stolen or whatever.

However, this does mean that lots of apps are available that otherwise wouldn't be. Apps that are really useful but don't meet the Play Store's guidelines for whatever reason. Many of these are available on stores like F-Droid, or you can just download an APK file from a website and install it. iOS has third-party App Stores available now but there are still a lot of hoops to jump through to access them. Way easier on Android.

Similarly, apps like Tasker are like iOS Shortcuts on steroids. Way more powerful and flexible, almost no restrictions on what you can do because the Android platform is more open.

5 – AMdroid

This is a stupid one but it was a huge quality of life improvement for me. Honestly one of my favourite things about my Android phone!

Android allows apps to manage the system alarm clock. There's an app called AMdroid which is a really OTT alarm clock manager, and it allows you to schedule dynamic alarms based on calendar events.

So, I gave it access to my calendar, and now my morning alarm only goes off when I'm actually scheduled to go to work that day. If I book time off work, I remove the scheduled “work” event for those days, and my alarm doesn't go off. I don't have to remember to turn it off for bank holidays. I fucking love it.

Bonus: rather than a snooze button, it has an “are you awake?” notification. This is really useful for me, I have a habit of falling asleep after turning my alarm off. With this app, I get a notification 10 mins after I stop the alarm, and if I don't tap to confirm I'm actually awake, the alarm goes off again.

Cons

1 – Contacts and Calendars Sync

In iOS, you just sign into whatever account in the system settings, and your data syncs to your phone. I was utterly astonished to discover that isn't how Android works. If you don't use Google for your contacts and calendars, you have to pay for an app to sync your data with the system address book and calendar. You can of course use non-system apps but that means you can't access that data easily from other apps. Not ideal!

Most people would just use a Google account, I'm sure. But fuck me, I thought Android was supposed to be more open than iOS? This is a fucking huge restriction.

2 – Swipe Right

I have my Android phone set to “gesture” mode where instead of the three buttons at the bottom of the screen, you swipe in various ways to go back to the Home screen or go back a step. I figured this was more like iOS and would make my transition easier. And I think it did, it was familiar. Apart from swiping to go back.

In iOS, swiping right reliably helps you to navigate; back a page, back to the previous menu, or sometimes opens a side menu bar. In Android, sometimes it does that, but sometimes it closes the app back to the Home screen. I can't tell you how many times I've accidentally closed an app trying to go back a step. As far as I'm concerned, if it's a system-wide gesture, it should always do the same thing.

3 – 1Password Issues

This one is a biggie. 1Password just doesn't work well on Android devices, in my experience using Waterfox on this phone. There are a few problems.

I've been using 1Password for a long time, and one of the key benefits of a password manager is that if the URL of the website you're trying to autofill your password into doesn't match the saved website (ie it's a lookalike designed to trick people into entering their password) it won't suggest your password for that website. If you manually search and try to enter the password anyway, it warns you the URL doesn't match. That means that I check the URL and realise it's a scam site or whatever. Awesome.

On my Android phone, I tap to autofill and it tells me the URL doesn't match. Except, it does. The URL is correct. There's some kind of redirection or interception going on in the chain somewhere where the URL I'm visiting is not the one that 1Password sees, so I get the warning every time, and I'm so used to seeing it now that I don't even check the URL and so I'm at risk of entering my password into a dodgy site cos I'm lazy. It's teaching me risky behaviour.

This same URL issue means I can't use passkeys on my Android phone. Any passkeys I saved from my Mac or my iPhone (which work fine there) fail on my Android phone because “the domain doesn't match”. Even though the saved address in the app matches the address in the browser. It's totally messed up.

Also, a lot of the time, it doesn't even suggest a login for a website until I start to search for it. That's always been flawless on iOS, but on Android, it just doesn't happen reliably. It's very frustrating.

4 – Home Assistant

Another big frustration for me that probably wouldn't register for most people is the way presence detection works in Home Assistant. I had a great setup going where the house would detect me at home when I pulled on the drive, and as I walked up to the back door, a BLE device in the house would trigger the door to unlock automatically. It was like magic. Doesn't fucking work with Android.

I have messed with every setting I can find (trust me, I spent a LOT of time on this) and background location and bluetooth stuff just does not work the same way it does on the iPhone. The only way I can get it to work is to flip open the phone when I pull on the drive, and again when I get near to the back door. Waking up the phone makes it update the sensors or whatever it is that happens in the background.

This also means that my GPS zones and room-based presence stuff is flaky too – the sensors don't update often enough to be useful to me. I'm already at work before my phone can warn me I didn't lock the back door.

Notifications were also delayed at first, taking several minutes to be delivered to my phone (not ideal for time sensitive things!) but I did find a setting to fix that which means that I have to keep a persistent connection to my Home Assistant server at a not-insignificant battery cost.

5 – Adverts and Nags

Wow. So many adverts. Motorola sent me a push notification about how I might like a new phone like a week after I got this phone. I get these sort of notifications from them about stuff I don't care about fairly often and haven't figured out where to turn them off. I don't know if I was just more careful on my iPhone but I just seem to get way more intrusive popups and notifications on my Android phone.

The system nags are another thing. I was getting weather alerts for weather that wasn't happening at my location. I didn't enable them, and it took me ages to find out how to turn them off.

I don't use Google for my photos, but I do have a Google account signed in (have to, for the Google Play store. And every time I open the Photos app to find a photo I took, I see a warning about how my photos aren't being backed up. Every now and then, I get a full screen unskippable dialogue about how to enable Photos backup. I have to tap through multiple screens and then find the unobtrusive “no thanks I'm good” option. Frustrating!

6 – Where Are My Photos?

In iOS, no matter where you get a photo from, it's visible in your main camera roll in the Photos app unless you specifically tell it to save it somewhere else in Files instead.

On this phone, if someone sends me a photo and I want to save it, I usually lose it. There's a “collections” section in the Photos app that has about 50 different locations things might be, some are named by app, some by file type, some are generic folder names... If I check there and then, I can remember which app I used to save the photo and it might (but not always) be in that folder. Different apps have different UI for uploading pictures too, so you might see recent stuff and be able to see the picture you're looking for or you might have to dig through folders and find it. It's really frustrating to have to hunt for a picture moments after you've saved it. It really shouldn't be so hard.

7 – Keyboard

A couple of gripes with the stock keyboard (Gboard). I could probably have fixed these by switching to a different keyboard, but I haven't.

The first one is the size of the keyboard; it takes up literally half of the screen. The Razr is fairly narrow so I guess that's part of the problem. But the keyboard really is quite obtrusive, covering a lot of content, and in many low quality apps and websites it also covers the box you're trying to type into so you can't see what you're typing. Lots of times when you try to scroll the bit above the keyboard to see more, it fucks up, you lose the keyboard focus or the page won't scroll. You have to hide the keyboard to check what you've typed.

The other thing that bugs me is the shortcuts available on the initial keyboard screen. This is probably a “me” problem but it's just extra friction every day. For example, I use forward slash a lot in my typing and it's not available as a “long press” on the first page of the keyboard, but backslash is. And I live in Ireland, and my location is set to Ireland, and the only option for currency on the first page is... £. I have to go to the second page and then tap and hold the £ on that page and then drag and select €. It's fiddly and annoying and I shouldn't have to do that given that the phone KNOWS I'm in a country that uses € as currency. € should be the default. The keyboard is set to English (UK), I can get the € symbol if I change the keyboard to Irish... but that fucks up other stuff.

8 – Poor Quality Apps

This is self explanatory. There are plenty of shitty apps on the iOS App Store too, but wooooow so many more on Android. Apart from the way they look, a lot of them struggle with layout problems, things being hidden that should be visible (as referenced in the keyboard point above). I guess that's partly because there are so many different form factors in Android devices and the developers haven't considered them all. Whatever, it's not a great experience sometimes.

In addition to that, many apps from the Play Store just would not install on this phone, saying it wasn't supported. I've had the opposite problem with iOS when a device was too old too support a new version, but it makes no sense for a newer phone not to support an older app.

9 – NFC Placement

I got used to this one but it's still kinda weird and awkward. The NFC antenna on the Razr is in the middle of the back of the bottom half of the phone, where the Motorola logo is.

I was used to the iPhone where it's at the top of the back, you hold the phone as you would normally and tap the tip of the phone on whatever you're trying to interact with. So without really thinking about it, that's what I tried to do with this phone; opened the flip and held it normally. No good.

The best way to tap NFC is to have the phone closed and hold it claw-like, trying not to let your palm touch the external screen so you don't accidentally tap something. It's not intuitive or comfortable. If you happen to have your phone open when you need to pay for something, the antenna is in the exact spot where your hand is naturally holding the phone. You can't just tap, you have to rotate your grip, and I always end up accidentally pressing the sleep button in the process. I usually just close the phone and do the claw grip thing.

10 – Updates

This is a Motorola thing, they're notorious for it, but Android 16 was released in June 2025, five months before I got this phone, and it was only available for my phone in June 2026, when other devices were getting Android 17. There's no sign of Android 17 being available for this phone yet. Kind of ridiculous.

11 – Music Playback

Another “me” problem, being a long-time Apple user, our household was geared up for Apple hardware and what was seamless on my iPhone is not so with Android.

We have Sonos speakers which work pretty well with AirPlay, you just start some music playing on your phone and then tap the icon to start it playing on whatever speaker in the house.

I've spent a LOT of time trying to replicate that on my Android phone and I've given up. If we had Chromecast compatible speakers, it would be fine. But we don't and I'm not planning to replace what we have, so I'm stuck with my messy workarounds. Currently, I'm using automations to start playback via Music Assistant now, but it's nowhere near as handy or intuitive as AirPlay. It definitely feels like a considerably downgraded experience.

12 – Camera

This is a difficult one. On paper, the Razr's camera is great, 50MP main camera. I have taken some good photos with it. But I've also taken a lot of BAD photos with it.

There was a weird filter automatically applied to selfies at first, I turned that off as soon as I figured that out. That seems like something you should turn on if you want it, not something that's enabled by default.

I've noticed many times that I can take a photo from the same spot as someone else who is using an iPhone, and their photos just look better. On an iPhone, you point and shoot and it does whatever techie wizardry Apple have baked into the camera app and you get a good photo. I don't seem to get reliably good results with my Razr, and often the end result looks absolutely nothing like what I saw in the preview, it's processed heavily. There are probably settings I can change, I don't know. All I know is, when we were in Iceland recently, I used Rob's iPhone to take all the photos because I didn't trust my phone to take good ones.

13 – MagSafe/Qi 2

MagSafe is so fucking useful. Qi 2 is the same thing, it's an open standard, and I will never buy a phone without it again. (The case I bought to hide the rose gold metal on the Razr included a magnet for MagSafe charging, thankfully.)

14 – Muscle Memory

The ultimate “me” problem: I was just so used to my iPhone that I kept trying to do the same stuff on the Android phone and getting frustrated when it didn't work.

A good example is scrolling through photos. On iOS, if you have the newest picture open, the previous one is to the left. It's the opposite on Android. I've been using this phone for almost a year and still can't get that right; every time I take some photos and then tap the little preview in the bottom corner to view what I just took, I look at the first one, then swipe the wrong way and get back to the camera.

I can do everything I need to on my Android phone, it just takes me a little longer, there's a little bit of friction involved in every step. I could persevere and I'm sure I would get used to it. But I don't really want to.

Thank U, Next

Well. In April 2026 Apple announced Tim Cook was stepping down as CEO. That happened this month. He's still employed at Apple, but he's not in charge any more.

My gripes with Apple (and Google, and Meta, and Microsoft and pretty much everyone else) are still there, but the big mental roadblock about giving Apple my money has shrunk considerably.

I don't need a new phone. My Razr is still working fine. But I AM experiencing daily frustration that I don't need to be putting myself through. And that's on top of everything I mentioned above. Cross platform stuff like shared shopping lists has been more of a headache than they need to be. Getting photos from Rob's phone to mine in Iceland stripped all the metadata so I had to manually adjust times and locations. Twenty other minor things that we took for granted before I switched to Android just annoy me, daily.

I love orange. I coveted the orange iPhone 17 Pro. It's not the new model any more, it's being discontinued, the price has dropped, I can get a good deal on billpay. Fuck it. I'm getting an orange iPhone.

My data is not going back onto Apple's servers; I'm self hosting as much as I can, and that's not changing. And I'll miss AMdroid and will definitely be looking for ways to replicate that on my new iPhone.

I definitely made my own life harder by not using a Google account to for contacts, calendars, email, photos... Many of my frustrations stemmed from that, but I refuse to give them any more of my data than I have to. And iOS works with third-party accounts much better.

My Android experiment is over. I didn't hate it, I just don't want to keep doing it.

Peak Summary

Peak: Moylussa County: Clare Height: 532m Ascent: 459m Distance: 10.1km Time: 2h 45m

Moylussa is a flattened hill overlooking Lough Derg, a large lake on the border between Galway, Clare and Tipperary. From the road, it's a pretty featureless lump looming over the countryside.

The trail starts in the carpark of Ballycuggaran Forest; there is a logging road winding up the hillside and you follow that for a good portion of the route. At the beginning, it's a series of switchbacks through the forest, with steep footpaths cutting between them so you don't have to follow the road back and forth. That took a big chunk off the distance, but when I say steep I mean STEEP! My poor achilles tendons felt the strain immediately. But it was really pretty and tranquil walking through the trees, with trickling streams and glimpses down to the lake from time to time. The map online has some really interesting names for some of these trails!

All too soon you're at the top of the forested section, and you just follow the road for another few kilometres. This was the boring bit. There's a steady incline, it's not difficult, the views a lot of the way are concealed by vegetation... but occasionally it opens up and you get a really gorgeous view of the lake from higher and higher vantage points.

Eventually, there's a sign for Moylussa, and you turn off the road onto a very narrow trail bounded on each side by thick overgrowth, and the “fun” begins.

As we walked up a straight section of trail, I could see what appeared to be a cliff at the end of the tunnel of vegetation. I assumed the trail would turn before the cliff. No such luck; the trail goes up!

Thankfully it wasn't a cliff but an incredibly steep section of trail with a dry streambed running down it, large rocks interspersed with shale. I would imagine there is water trickling down it much of the year. It was tough going, but we made it to the top and carried on... only to find another incline as steep as the first, but taller. This one twisted around and out of sight at the top.

Around the corner was the start of a narrow wooden boardwalk which we followed across the boggy hilltop to a large stone which marks the peak of Moylussa.

The top of the hill is quite flat so the “peak” isn't much higher than the surrounding hillside, and as such the views were not really any better than we had seen on the way up. If anything, they were less dramatic, because we had a stretch of bogland between us and the view. Nevertheless, we stopped to admire them for a while, got our bearings and spotted some landmarks such as the windfarm we can see from the back of our house, and some more interesting peaks we might be visiting over the next few months.

After a while, we headed back along the same route. There is a smaller peak between Moylussa and the lake, Feenlea, which you can take in as part of a loop, but all the guides I read online said the paths are not so well trodden and it can be very boggy and difficult, and since our target was the county peak, we decided to give it a miss.

I enjoyed the trip back more than the way up, because we were walking towards the lake and had the nice views all the way, instead of only when we looked behind us now and then. And it was downhill, of course!

I really liked the forest, and the views from near the top, but it was an underwhelming peak compared to Diamond Hill the other week. I would visit the forest again, but probably not Moylussa.

Tags

#peaks #ireland #clare #munster #hiking #countyhighpoints

If you're not interested in the backstory, jump to the plan or the progress tracker.

The Background

I have a friend, Paweł, who is a bit more active than me. He plays squash, he goes running (well, he has done more recently than me, anyway!) and he hikes. In an effort to improve my general fitness, I said I'd go hiking with him.

Not-So Baby Steps

We did our first hike together last October; The Stairway to Heaven in Fermanagh. Paweł mentioned it one day, it sounded like a good start and it's near Enniskillen in Northern Ireland so we could roll in a cross-border trip to Asda for some cheap booze. Win win!

It's a bit of a trek from here so we started early and got the shopping out of the way before heading to the carpark for the Cuilcagh Boardwalk Trail, the official name of the Stairway to Heaven. It was overcast but not too cold and windy, some rain forecast for the afternoon so we set a brisk pace to get up and back before then.

It's a fairly easy hike, up to a point. A gravel track and then a long steady incline across open moorland via a wooden boardwalk. Eventually you get to the steps... at first there are just a few every now and then, but then you get to the stairway itself – 450 steps zig-zagging up the side of a cliff.

450 steps might not sound like all that many. It FELT like way more. The steps are unevenly spaced and it isn't “comfortable” to walk up them, and it was incredibly tiring. But it was worth the effort! There's a platform at the top where we stopped and took in the gorgeous views across the countryside to Lough Erne and beyond, with the boardwalk snaking across the moor and the weirdly-shaped limestone hills leftover from the Ice Age in the foreground. We had a snack and a drink, took some photos and headed back to the car.

The return trip was much quicker (although the stairs were still awkward on the way down, slightly too high for comfort). We made it back to the car in around 2.5 hours. On a nicer day we might have stayed at the top for a while and not pushed ourselves quite so much on the way back and it would have taken longer.

We actually went to explore those weird hills before we went home; the Marble Arch caves are nearby, carved out of the hills by three rivers, and we took a tour through them since we were so close. At 11.5km it's the longest cave system in Northern Ireland, and they are described online as some of the most impressive caves in Europe. The tour was really interesting, it started with a boat trip on an underground river and there was a load of history about the exploration of the cave system. Even the above-ground area was beautiful; ancient woodland surrounding sinkholes, very cool. It's definitely worth a look if you're ever nearby!

Levelling Up

There was a bit of a gap, 9 months went by, but a few weeks ago Paweł suggested we climb Diamond Hill in Connemara.

I've visited the area many times – we love the Connemara countryside; it's very similar to where we lived in Wales, the beaches out beyond Clifden are incredible and nearby Kylemore Abbey is a common stop when we're taking visitors sightseeing. Diamond Hill is well known, but I've never had anyone to go with. Until now!

It's in the same county as us, but it really is the wild west – no major roads, bottlenecks in all the towns and villages on the way there, meandering routes through picturesque valleys between mountain peaks. It's a gorgeous drive, but it takes longer to get there than it does to get to Dublin which is on the opposite side of the country.

We didn't factor in the weather beyond “it's not going to rain” but it turned out to be one of the hottest days of the year, not really ideal for a strenuous hike. The carpark was crowded, the visitor centre was pretty full, but the trail itself wasn't too busy. I guess most people weren't stupid enough to attempt the climb in the blazing sun!

The first half of the climb is easy; a nice clear trail, a few steps, the occasional boardwalk, a bridge over a mountain stream. Then you get to a point where the trail splits, it's a one-way loop, left to ascend and the people on the way down come from the right (although we passed more than a couple of people heading back down the up path!). From here, things got more interesting! A steeper climb, as we got closer to the top there were stone steps either laid or cut into the rock, and I had to stop a few times not because I was tired but because I was just overheating, I needed to rest and let my body calm down a bit. Each stop was rewarded by the increasingly incredible views over the countryside and out to sea. The climb got steeper and steeper the closer to the top we got.

The ascent is from the Clifden side of the hill, so the views that way are of the valleys leading down to the west-Galway coastline. When we got to the top however, we were treated to a 360° view including the hills and mountains of Mayo, Achill Island in the distance, the taller peaks of the 12 Bens to the East, and, right below us, the valley with Kylemore Abbey, its lake and walled garden, in miniature due to the distance but still clearly visible. A truly spectacular view, thanks to the clear weather.

We enjoyed that view (and the cool breeze!) for a while, Paweł shared his Polish sausage with me, we took some photos, and then we continued along the descent path which went down the far side of the hill. The first bit was just as steep as the ascent, but then we were on a boardwalk which followed the valley floor all the way around the hill and back to the point where the trail split earlier.

We got back to the car after around 2.5 hours, and headed to a beach near Cleggan for a dip in the Atlantic to cool down before heading home.

The Plan

While we were climbing Diamond Hill, I mentioned that a friend of mine visited the highest points in each county of Ireland. It was a gorgeous day, we were enjoying the climb... we decided we would do the same.

Over the next few days I did some research, started making plans. There are 32 counties on the island of Ireland, but some of the county peaks are on the borders between counties so they are shared between them; there are 27 unique peaks.

Around half of them are under 609m (2000ft) and so are considered hills rather than mountains, and many of those are very easy hikes, particularly Longford, Meath and Westmeath's peaks – all three can be done in the same afternoon. There are a few others that can be checked off in a single trip.

But that means half of them ARE mountains and will require proper planning and good weather conditions. I'm not a mountaineer, but none of them are exactly Everest. There's no actual climbing required, but there's not always a clear path to follow. Some of them will take all day, not just a couple of hours. The highest of all is Carrauntoohil in County Kerry at 1039m. We might save that one for last...

Rather frustratingly, the highest peak for Cavan and Fermanagh is... Cuilcagh, which is a couple of km beyond the top of the Stairway to Heaven. If we'd kept going back in October, we could have visited that peak very easily!

So, here we go! We haven't set ourselves a time limit, we'll do this as and when we can, when the weather and Paweł's shifts align. Our first hike is planned for this weekend – Moylussa in County Clare, our closest one. It's a hill overlooking Lough Derg, if we're lucky with the weather we should have another gorgeous view as a reward for reaching the top.

Tracking Our Progress

I wanted some way to plan and track our progress. I've been messing with agentic AI, so I got my dude to build a web app for me. I gave it a rundown of what I wanted, and I tweaked it until I was happy with how it works. I have a list of all the peaks, I've also added some other places we have either hiked or would like to hike, you can sort and filter in all kinds of ways, and it shows our next target.

This link is pre-filtered to show the highest peak in each county, sorted alphabetically. The blue one is our next (first!) target. The colour indicates the status, and the icon indicates the height – hill, mountain or BIG mountain (by Irish standards).

Distances are calculated from the home location configured by the “settings” cog, it's set to Loughrea by default (which is where I live) but if you're curious you can add any location you wish. Clicking the “x” will clear all filters and show everything (including the non-peaks). I'll update the status of each peak as we go, and I'll probably (maybe) add a link to a blog post about that particular climb.

Notes

*I say “climbing”, but some of the highest points of Ireland are not particularly high.

I plan to write up some of my techie stuff, my plans to hike up the highest peaks of every county of Ireland, and whatever else happens to bubble out of my brain whenever I get the urge.

It will probably be very boring.