The forecast said clear from about nine, and for once it was right.

I’d been meaning to do Brandon since autumn. I had it in my head after the loop above Anascaul Lake in November – that walk had whetted something – but then December arrived with its own logic and the mountain sat there unreachable-feeling, which is not the same as being unreachable. January cleared things out a bit. Four days of rain and then a hard frost, and on the morning of the fifteenth I woke up early and decided that this was the day before I had time to think my way out of it.

The route I wanted was Faha. The western approach, up through the crags, not the Cosán na Naomh coming in from the east. I’d done the Cosán twice before – the pilgrim path through the mountain’s back – but the Faha route is steeper and more direct and in January, with the mountain to yourself, it felt like the right choice.

The path holds the previous week of rain inside it, all the way to the first crag.

I left the cottage at half seven. Still dark, or near enough. The Yaris started first time, which I appreciate more than I used to since that noise under the dashboard began in earnest over the frost. I drove north up the peninsula and turned off toward Cloghane. The road down to the Faha carpark runs along the side of the hill and you can see almost nothing of Brandon from it on the way in, just the bottom of a slope and, above that, cloud or sky depending on the day. That morning it was sky. I took that as a good sign and parked before I could start doubting it.

Setting off in the cold

There was one other car in the carpark. No one visible. I pulled on an extra layer – a fleece I’d had since the B&B days, grey, one of the pockets not quite closing – and got my boots on properly and stood there for a moment eating a piece of bread I’d brought from home. The soda bread has been going well this month, finally. Small triumphs.

The path from Faha begins gently enough. A track up through bog and rough grass, the ground soft and dark, holding water the way January ground does even after a frost. Below me on the left, the valley toward Brandon Creek was still in shade. The sea was just visible beyond it, flat and grey-green, and beyond that nothing but sky. I walked slowly. Not because I was tired – I hadn’t gone more than ten minutes – but because there is a particular pleasure in a slow early start on a long ascent, when the cold is still in your hands and your eyes are still adjusting and you don’t yet know how the legs will feel.

The steepness comes on gradually at first and then all at once. Above the lower bog, the path rises through a series of rocky crags and the going gets serious – not technical, nothing requiring hands, but real climbing with height gained quickly and the ground shifting from mud to rock under your feet. I stopped twice in this section, once to take off the fleece because the exertion had caught up with the cold, and once to look back down the valley. Brandon Creek far below. The bay beyond it beginning to catch the light. The Maharees, that long thin finger of land pointing north, bright against the dark water. I stood there for longer than I needed to.

Above the crags, the path opens onto the upper shoulder of the mountain, a wide, wild place where the wind gets its proper run at you. January wind. Not fierce, that day, but steady and cold and with a damp edge that cuts through things. I put the fleece back on. The summit was visible now, the stone oratory at the top just distinguishable against the sky, and I was glad to be able to see it.

The summit in January

There is an oratory at the top of Brandon – a small stone structure, corbelled, very old, associated with the saint who is said to have stood here and looked west and imagined a world beyond the water. I find it best not to think too hard about Brendan the Navigator while standing at 952 metres in January because you will immediately start imagining what the Atlantic looks like in a currach and that is not a comfortable thought. The oratory is plain and modest and it fits the mountain. I sat with my back against the east wall of it and got out the second piece of bread and ate it.

The view from the top on a clear January day is extraordinary in the blunt, matter-of-fact way that enormous views sometimes are – not showy, just enormous. Tralee Bay spread out below to the northeast, broad and still and pale. The Maharees below me on the left. Brandon Bay on the right, and beyond it the hills above Castlegregory. To the south, the spine of the peninsula running out toward Slea Head and the Blaskets, the headlands stacking up in the cold air like cut paper. To the north and west, nothing but sea. I have looked at this view before, in better weather, in summer, and it does something different in January. The colours are stripped back. The light is low and very clear and everything that’s left is what’s actually there.

I was alone. That is, I had been alone since the carpark, and I was still alone at the top, and I didn’t meet anyone on the way down. One other person had been up here recently – the carpark, the other car – but we missed each other, or they’d come and gone before me. I have no particular views about solitude on mountains, which is to say I neither seek it nor mind it. That day it felt like the right version of the walk. There was nobody to talk to so I didn’t talk, which suited the place.

I stayed at the top for maybe twenty minutes. Long enough to eat, to look, to get cold sitting still after the climb. The wind had picked up slightly. To the west the sky was as clear as it had been all morning, no weather coming, or none I could see. I thought about Donal’s Sunday call, three days before, him asking had I any plans for the week. I’d told him I was thinking of a walk and he’d said ‘mind yourself’ and that was that. He worries in a quiet, not especially helpful way.

Going back down

The descent by the same route is straightforward. The crags are steep enough going down that you have to pay attention, place your feet carefully, trust the boots. I like descents for the way they reverse everything – the things you noticed going up become different, lit from the other side, and the places you stopped become legible in a new way. The valley opened up below me again. The frost was gone from the lower slopes; the bog was dark and wet and a pair of ravens were doing something complicated above the tree line, circling each other in a way that seemed purposeful.

I was back at the carpark by half twelve. A good four and a half hours for the round trip. The other car was gone. I sat in the Yaris with the heat on and drank from the flask – Barry’s, which had been hot when I left the cottage and was now the acceptable not-quite-warm version – and I ate the last of what I’d brought, a biscuit that had been at the bottom of my bag since probably Tuesday.

The road back to the main peninsula route runs along the bay and you get a different view of Brandon from below on the return, the full height of it, the long western face in shadow, the summit you were standing on an hour ago now abstract and far away in the way all summits go once you’ve left them. I pulled over for a minute to look at it properly. There was nobody behind me. January has its uses.

I got home before three. The light was already thinning. I made a pot of tea, opened the book that’s been on the arm of the chair – I’ve been finishing things slowly this month, as I noted last week, and the pattern is holding – and sat by the range until the feeling came back fully to my feet.

Bess appeared at the gate around four, wanting in for reasons known only to herself. I let her in.

Tom came for her at five, standing at the back door with his cap on, not saying much.

‘Grand day for it,’ he said, meaning the mountain, because Maeve must have told him I was going.

‘Grand day,’ I said.

He took the dog and went back up the lane and I closed the back gate, which stuck, as it always does.