Charlie Horan (of Go with the Flow, the canoe expedition specialists) left a comment on my post about Abbeyleix (below) saying
I have some very very interesting pictures of the Barrow near source in flood taken just two weeks ago ….
And here they are. They are indeed interesting!
White water (courtesy Eamonn and Charlie Horan)
Eek (courtesy Eamonn and Charlie Horan)
The burling Barrow brown (as Gerald Manley Hopkins called it) (courtesy Eamonn and Charlie Horan)
Even the indefatigable F E Prothero might have been put off …. He canoed down from Mountmellick to Athy in 1897, taking about eight and a half hours. Major Rowland Raven-Hart said that the Barrow had been canoed from a little above Portarlington (which is downstream of Mountmellick); there is a PDF of his book here.
Irish waterways history 