A Sunrise Run Through Rathcoole Woodlands

Every stride since has been borrowed time

Photo Credit: Author

It is 6:23 a.m.

I leave my estate in the dark before sunrise, zipping my windbreaker against the cold. My legs are heavy, and my mind is already negotiating with itself, running the same tired argument it runs every morning at this hour.

But I do not stop.

I pass the stone wall of Lisheen Nursing Home. Christy Brown lived here once, a man born with cerebral palsy who painted and wrote with his left foot while the world quietly wrote him off.

I run past on two working legs I nearly lost. In March 2025, I lay on an operating table while a surgeon replaced my right hip—every stride since has been borrowed time I didn’t expect to get.

One breath. No lecture. Just the faint weight of someone else’s defiance pressing against my back as I move.

The entrance to Rathcoole Woodlands opens on my left.

Light is breaking through in uneven strips, landing on wet ground and dark soil, on leaves pressed flat by years of passing feet.

The air shifts the moment I step under the canopy.

Cooler. Denser. It carries the smell of rain that is not falling yet, that particular earthen cold that lives only in places left mostly alone. Somewhere above me, a wood pigeon calls once and does not repeat itself.

My steps change without instruction. Softer now, more measured, the way you lower your voice in a room that asks for it.

Inside the woodlands, I feel centred. Not calm exactly, but held. My breath finds its own rhythm. My shoulders drop without permission.

A squirrel darts across my path, quick and grey and entirely unbothered by my presence. It pauses at the base of an ash tree just long enough to look straight through me, then vanishes into the undergrowth.

I stop.

Not because of the squirrel. Because of what it did to me in the half second it lasted. It cut through everything without asking — the training plan, the emails waiting, the noise I had carried out of the house like luggage I forgot I was holding — and it dropped me into the exact moment I was standing in. Nothing before it. Nothing after. Just this path and this light and this small grey animal that owed me nothing and gave me everything.

The path under my feet is older than my thoughts. Mill workers walked this same line through the trees in the 18th century, moving from Rathcoole to the mill in Saggart before dawn, the same rhythm of effort, the same quiet return home with tired legs and minds emptied by physical work. The name of this place carries older echoes still. Rathcoole. The Ráth of Fionn mac Cumhaill’s father, myth pressed so deep into the ground that the town built itself on top of it.

Rathcoole Woodlands almost did not survive to receive me this morning.

For six years, a community fought a plan that would have turned this woodland into housing estates and playing fields. They were told the land was needed. They held anyway. In 2022, it was rezoned and saved, though saved is a generous word for something still without protected status, still dependent on people showing up.

None of that is in front of me as a fact this morning. It sits under everything instead, the way you sense pressure in the air before rain arrives.

The sun breaks fully over the treeline now, crimson first and then gold, flooding the upper canopy and sending light cascading down through the ash and oak in long, slow columns. The woodland fills with birdsong I could not name if I tried, layered and unhurried, belonging entirely to itself.

I feel alive in this body.

Grateful for it in a way that does not come easily at a desk or on a screen.

I am not escaping anything out here in Rathcoole Woodlands. I am returning to something.

The past is not behind me on this path. It is under me, in me, moving with me without asking permission.

As I exit back onto the road, the day has fully started. The world is waking to its noise and its demands. I check my watch and zip my windbreaker back up against the morning air.

The golden light is still coming through the trees.

The woodland is still there behind me; a living thing that fought to stay alive, still here at sunrise, asking nothing.