Ireland 2016, part 2

Part 1 of this story

Day 3:
In two days I had made it down to Glenmalure. I booked two nights there, planning to take it easy on the day in between. Originally I thought of bringing my hiking boots and going for a walk in the hills, but as it happened, the Army was firing that day in the artillery range on the other side, and on those days hiking in the area behind the hostel is banned – not that you’d really feel like it anyway once you hear a few shells bursting. So I left the boots at home and planned to pootle out of the valley in the direction of Rathdrum and Avoca.

First complication was roadworks – the road was being resurfaced down by Greenan and there was a diversion over the hills into Rathdrum. I still reckoned I could get back into the glen via Ballinaclash. So I sweated my way over the quite considerable hills to Rathdrum and went to the supermarket there. Then I headed down the main road towards Avoca. I stopped at the Meeting of the Waters, where the Avonmore river from Lough Dan meets the Avonbeg river from Glenmalure. After a quick look around I returned to my bike and suddenly noticed something was missing. My rain jacket was gone. That’s fairly serious in a country like Ireland where you have to be ready for rain any time. I’d been keeping it in straps on the top of my saddlebag and it wasn’t there any more.

So, I retraced my route back to Rathdrum. No sign of the jacket on the way or in the supermarket. Even if I might find it on the way, I thought I couldn’t risk heading back up the glen without one – I had to get out of there the next day – so I looked for a shop that might have a substitute. A shop promisingly called “Sports & Leisure”, if I remember correctly, turned out not to have any, so I tried one called “Draper”. Did they have rain jackets? “Oh we do”, said the kind young lady, “but we only have the expensive ones”, she added, apologetically. “How much are they?”, I asked. “Twenty-two euro”, she replied. So for this sum I got a good old-fashioned non-breathable rain jacket of the sturdy variety, of the Regatta brand. I didn’t mention that the one I’d lost had cost € 120, heavily reduced, but I did explain a little bit about what I was up to and somehow I mentioned coming through Glenmacnass and the young lady said oh she was from there. So thank you, young shop-keeping lady, it turned out to be a very good buy indeed.

For the old jacket never showed up, despite retracing my way exactly over the hills and keeping a good eye on the hedgerows. Still, when I got back over to the Glenmalure Lodge pub, the sun was shining and I popped into see if I could get a copy of a local history book the warden at the hostel had told me about. Written by Carmel O’Toole, who grew up and has lived all her life in the glen, if she’s still there. The same glen has a fair bit of history attached to it between the old mine workings and no shortage of saints and rebels passing through, or hiding out, there in the old days. I did get a copy of it and even better, they turned out to have O’Hara’s Irish Ale on tap, so I had one of those at an outside table and for a man who had just lost an expensive jacket that he had been fond of, my mood was about as good as it could be.

Day 4:
This turned out to be quite a day. It started with torrential rain most of the night. The rain looked like it was in for the day, heavy and steady. A darkness over the valley from the low cloud. In theory, I was heading for Kilkenny, where I had a hotel room booked. After a good big fried breakfast I set off down to the pub, having to use the footbridge across the river because the ford was well and truly under water. Stopped at the pub to ask about the lost jacket – no luck – and to use the mobile signal to ring sister #2, because I really wasn’t sure how far I’d get in this weather. Especially with the gear I had on, which was just normal clothes with rain trousers and my new rain jacket over them. Feet already nice and wet because no overshoes. Sister #2 said she’d pick me up in the van if necessary and that the weather down there (southern Co. Kilkenny) was alright. So off I went up Slieve Maan, the mountain between Glenmalure and Aghavannagh. Pushing the bike probably a bit more than half the way, because it’s steep. No photos of this bit for obvious reasons!

Towards the top of the mountain I was in the cloud and the visibility was low. I didn’t think there’d be many people out in their cars but if they were, I guessed they wouldn’t be expecting anyone walking or on a bike, so I switched on my lights and put on my high-vis vest. The only sign of life was an invisible cow bellowing in a very aggrieved tone somewhere to my left, and well it might in this weather, I thought. A little bit further on, two figures with rucksacks loomed out of the mist. “Nice day for a walk,” I greeted them. “Nice day for a drive viss ze bicycle”, one replied. Yes, it was the kind of weather when only eejits from German-speaking countries would dream of heading up the mountain.

I eased myself down the steep descent into Aghavannagh very carefully, in the dark grey of the mist and rain, taking a picture of the swollen river at the bridge. After the bridge, the road winds up through the woods, first to the left and then to the right, climbing out towards Barnamelia. And there the miracle happened. First there was just a small patch where the sky lightened up a bit. I took a picture because I thought it’d be gone again soon. But then … (read the picture captions)

So in the space of about twenty minutes, the weather changed from unbroken grey with heavy rain that seemed like it was in for the day to sunny weather with a warm, blustery wind. Also, the photos don’t really do justice to the sight of the clouds peeling off the southern edge of the mountains, lined up from here across to the Glen of Imaal to the (north) west, towards Baltinglass.

In the old days, the handiest route to Kilkenny would have been via Baltinglass and Castledermot to Carlow and Leighlinbridge, but that road has heavy traffic now and I had planned a different route, across country through Hacketstown and Bagenalstown. I’d never quite been to Hacketstown; one time I rode around from the Glen of Imaal (Knockanarrigan) to Aghavannagh, in mild September sunshine, but skirted the mountains closely and didn’t venture further south. The whole area between the Wicklow and Blackstairs mountains seems to be a bit off the beaten track, at least for tourists; or maybe just to me. In a story by Paula Leyden, Tomnafinnoge forest, a bit to the southeast near Tinahely, is the home of Finbar the Furious, the ogre who could do no wrong; but making it a home of ogres also seems to make the area a bit wild and remote. It isn’t really. The region is busy fertile farmland, it’s just that it doesn’t have a central town. There’s Wicklow and Arklow and Gorey to the east, Enniscorthy to the south and Carlow to the west. Hacketstown is typical of the kind of substantial village or small town that is the backbone of the Irish countryside, and was even more so when fewer people had cars and before the motorways exposed everywhere to the pull of the bigger towns and cities in a more everyday way.

I also had in mind a mention of Hacketstown in a monologue by Frank Kelly – in the days when he was a man with a funny radio show:

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I have no idea whether Frank Kelly had any connection with the area, or chose it for the vague suburban feeling that this neck of the woods was a little bit beyond the edge of things; as indeed the village of Ballykilferret he invented for his radio show seems to be anywhere from here to Co. Kildare and maybe even as far afield as Co. Westmeath. On the other hand, in his sketches the laugh is also on the posh-accented outsider failing pathetically to get the drift of local banter and customs. (To the world outside Ireland and people maybe a year or two younger than myself, Frank Kelly is better known as Father Jack Hackett of Father Ted).

So I went there for lunch, with the wind blow-drying me along the way, in a state of general euphoria and love for the landscape, and a grand place it is. The village is on the ridge of a funny-shaped hill, which you can see in the town’s logo, but I missed taking a picture at the point in the road where you can see this profile. I headed into the SuperValu and ordered a ham and coleslaw sandwich (one of the things I miss about Ireland). A polite gentleman made up the sandwich for me and it wasn’t until I headed for the checkout that I discovered a shelf full of ready-made ones. It was nice of the man not to just point me to them but to make me a special one; especially since I must have looked fairly scruffy from the washing I’d got coming over the mountain.

The afternoon then wore down my good mood considerably: the smaller roads in Ireland tend to be a constant choppy up and down and this had to be done through a succession of squally showers tearing across the landscape: the kind where a curtain of grey approaches across the fields and standing in the lee of a tree or a wall is as good as putting on your jacket, because the rain is going sideways. I carried on through Tullow, Nurney and Bagenalstown/Muine Bheag.

I had been thinking of following the small roads south of the R712 into Kilkenny, but my legs were almost beyond coping with any more gradients, so I hit the old main road at Royal Oak and covered the last 20 km or so the easy way. This road used to be pleasant enough to cycle, but the traffic is now hellish. As a fairly useless form of compensation, the old hard shoulder, which we always used to use for riding on, has been decorated with bike pictograms. This doesn’t inhibit people from pulling their SUVs over to have phone conversations, etc. And of course the cycle facility disappears completely at the one point where it would have a real use, the busy Paulstown junction, where you need eyes all round your head and good timing.

I can’t quite remember to what extent the blustery wind was a headwind. I think headwinds get shut out of my normal mental processing. A headwind has no time and no distance. The only important thing about it is that it’s going to be over; and as soon as it’s over, it’s like it never happened. Whatever; the stretch to Kilkenny was about traffic noise, wind and complaining quads – this on a total of about 90 km for the day; that’s how unfit I was.

The approaches to Kilkenny town have a collection of attempts at bike paths which are  gobsmackingly substandard – at one point delivering me to the side of a two-lane roundabout with no crossing and an unbroken heavy flow of traffic. I had to go back about 40 yards and join the traffic on the inside lane, mustering up the effort to get with the flow of cars. The continuation of the path on the other side was interrupted by deep entranceways and none of its crossings with side roads was properly organized.

In terms of the terrain, distances, places to see and accommodation, the southeast is a fantastic part of the world for cycle touring. Scenic mountains, beaches, antiquities, rolling farmland, rivers … But if you want to market it successfully to continental visitors, you really need to see the quality of the cycling infrastructure and the general experience of cycling (driver behaviour) through the eyes of people used to German, or Dutch, or Italian, or Scandinavian standards. Fantastic trips could be had not just riding on the Waterford greenway but also to it from Dublin, and back again – say down via Wicklow, Kilkenny and Lismore and back via the Wexford coast. But some level of strategic effort is needed to avoid giving such tourists dispiriting, or downright dangerous and traumatic experiences.

Having got that off my chest, I have to say a big thank you to the Club House Hotel for letting me in in my bedraggled state, having been washed multiple times during the day. The hotel was also excellent value. And just for a little joke on me, the evening turned all balmy, as though the filthy weather of the day had never happened.