Day 6:
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The final day of my tour started with sorting out my luggage, which I had spread out to dry, picking out the last of my (partially) clean clothes, and a good hotel breakfast. I didn’t have far to go, just about 40 km through the south Co. Kilkenny countryside. Thank goodness, because my quadriceps were painful and weak. The rest of me was fine. Arse had that old-time several days on the road feeling; nothing terrible. The weather was blustery and a bit drizzly. Jacket off being too wet and jacket on being too sweaty, I settled for wearing the jacket unzipped and flapping in the wind – just like my teenage touring days in the 80s.
The wind turned out to be very strong and mostly a headwind as I headed down the road to Kells (not to be confused with Kells, Co. Meath). When I stopped to take a picture of the stone bridge, a friendly dog came to sniff what had been my food pannier (it was empty at this point). Goodness knows how many of these stone arch bridges there are in Ireland and how old they all are; many of them are still carrying heavy traffic, as though they were built for modern trucks.



This part of Ireland having been at the heart of the medieval Norman kingdom, there are lots of ruins in the landscape to admire. The priory just after Kells village still took me by surprise, because it is a big fortified complex, looking more like a castle than an abbey. There are reasons for this. I had time to admire it because a shower came through and I sheltered in the lee of a wall across the road.
I failed to turn off beside the priory for the small road towards Newmarket and ended up following the slightly larger road across the new motorway and through Stoneyford, a smart-looking village I don’t think I’d seen before, and on to Knocktopher. Last sandwich of the tour was at the filling station there, while another sharp little shower passed through. The mile or two west of Knocktopher was totally exposed to the wind, and riding was really getting quite unpleasant, with frequent stops, by the time I started on the drag out past Booleyglass, heading towards Templeorum.
On the way I did an unwise thing. On the fairly narrow road, some fecker rocketed past me in a BMW doing, I estimate, about 100 km/h. I’m afraid the cumulative frustration with all the punitive and close passing, and other ignorant arseholery that I had experienced since leaving Dublin, got the better of me, and I gave the bollix a huge middle finger gesture. Not good! Screech of brakes, noise of a reverse gear having about half its working lifetime consumed over about 150-200 yards, and I was confronted with a very offended young lad. Species: possibly the kind of young fella who has a job and can afford a car but can’t afford to move out of home. His car is his castle. What did he do to deserve that, he wanted to know. He wasn’t going fast (!) and he’d left plenty of room. Well, he had left me such room as the road offered, but this was probably no more than 1.5 m, which is fairly uncomfortable at that speed. I asked him if he’d ever been on a bike and experienced being passed like that. What do you mean, am I experienced?, he spluttered, a classic piece of Irish wordplay, quite amusing from someone obviously less than half my age. For his own good I’d have liked to give him a lecture about lines of sight and hedgerows and how easily he could be surprised by a tractor coming out of a field, but I was afraid he might get out and start hitting me, so I did my best to deescalate the conversation and after a few more indignant justifications of his driving style, he headed off.
Memo to self: try not to do this again, because I could easily land myself with someone twice my size who wouldn’t be content with a bit of the verbal.
That road is always longer than I expect, though I’ve known it for decades. A drag with many bumps, it doesn’t look like a big climb, just rolling farmland, but it adds up, and your legs (especially if they’re worn out) tell you it’s more than meets the eye; and no very definite summit, but at some point you realize it no longer feels like wading through porridge, and then no, you’re imagining it, no, you’re not, there is actually a southward tilt under the bumps, signalling that you’ve passed the Nore-Suir watershed, and just after that you’re at the fork to the road that drops below the church in Templeorum. One last climb out of the village to sister #2’s farmhouse. Here’s a little video of the Suir valley spread out to the south and west.
And a welcome to the yard by little Rascal the terrier, who remembered me.
End of tour.
(FYI: I brought the bike back to Dublin by train. This worked alright, except that the reservation told me the bike places were in a carriage where they weren’t; but I transferred to the right carriage at the next station. There was space for exactly two bikes on the train.)
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