Day 180: The Last of Ireland

Tags

Cromwell, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Banville, Matt Seaton, Paul Kimmage, Rosslare Harbour, Twelfth Night, Wexford

A Cycle Around the British Isles … Part 74

Despite it being Sunday, Wexford is busy and the majority of shops are open and doing good trade. I have two priorities; a new cycling shirt and a new novel; but I get waylaid. Buying a takeaway coffee I wander and browse and window shop and just quietly get a feeling for the place. The town centre seems small and compact and mostly on the one street that runs parallel with the river front.

It is the old harbour that attracts my attention. I wander slowly along on the river side and then mosey across the bridge where, quite suddenly, I’m looking out to sea. Or am I? This is a huge natural harbour and, in its time, it has been a port of considerable importance. Once, like Liverpool, the wharves and piers extended for miles but the harbour has suffered a gradual decline over centuries. At its peak it was home to a fleet of over 400 ships. Unfortunately these were largely privateers (in other words, pirate ships for hire), which operated against English shipping using ports on the west coast of England from Whitehaven to Bristol. To be rid of this threat to his merchant fleet was a significant factor behind Cromwell’s choice of Wexford as the second Irish town he laid siege to. He destroyed the harbour, the ships and saw many drowned. Another of his motives for attacking Wexford was to take it as a winter quarters for his troops and to be able to use the natural harbour for his own ships. Such was the thoroughness of the destruction that neither was possible.

Over the centuries, as ships got bigger and drew more water, the shifting sands and silts of the harbour and the river estuary became more of a problem. After 1800 when all decisions were made by a London government, Wexford went into a real decline as a port. The constant dredging necessary was proving a bigger task than it was deemed worth. In 1906 a new deep water harbour was opened ten miles to the south at Rosslare. Wexford is now more of a marina. I sit on a bench and enjoy watching other people just messing about in boats. It’s a perfect afternoon for it.

I’d agreed to be back at the house by five. Time has ticked on. Not wanting to appear rude and ungrateful I rush back through the town finding a bookshop where I grab a copy of The Sea by John Banville (seems particularly appropriate), but shirt shops are closed. The t shirt I’m wearing has been successively dry, drenched with sweat, dried on me, drenched with sweat once more, and dried on me again. It looks like I’ll be wearing it for a few hours more.

At the house my bicycle is being given a impromptu service. Tyres newly pumped, chains and cogs oiled. Even the water bottles are freshly filled. I’m not sure if this never cleaned in thirty years bicycle hasn’t had a hose pipe pointed at it during the course of the afternoon. A huge part of me feels a tremendous ingratitude in not even being able to remember the man’s name. Another part knows that he offered me this kindness because he could and as a good man he did. He didn’t do it for thanks and a once a year card from over the water. Though I would like to send both.

He walks back down to the quay with me to make sure I’m on the right road. The afternoon light has changed the complexion of the buildings and the reflections on the water. Shadows are beginning to lengthen and I know that this next hour will be the last cycling I will do in Ireland for a long time. I take only three of the hundred photographs I should have taken on this day. So much has happened since breakfast. So much had happened since I landed on the harbour side at Larne. So much had happened since I crossed the Scottish border, since I set off with Charlie from home half a lifetime ago. It was with these feelings of nostalgia for my own adventure that I left Wexford and my short-term true friend and slowly rolled on my way.

The views of the coast and out to sea are lovely in the evening sun but once you leave the treelined outskirts of the town you see the sort of modern developments that you’d expect to see on what is the main trunk road not just to the harbour, but to mainland Britain, Brittany and Northern Spain. Where once was countryside two car showrooms are the modern pillars of Hercules, one selling German cars, the other selling French. I pass between them only to see more; Swedish trucks, Japanese cars, Korean cars. There follow a succession of modern, knock them up quickly, steel framed buildings of the type where the warehouses don’t differ greatly from the office blocks and the hotels. For Sale signs are common but not as common as those proclaiming the building is For Lease. The builders have been paid but many of the buildings lie empty. I pass what may be my last Topaz petrol station and I recite from lines learned when in a production of Twelfth Night when I was younger and there was still hope:

Fie, thou dishonest Satan! I call thee by the most

modest terms, for I am one of those gentle ones

that will use the devil himself with courtesy.

Sayest thou that the house is dark?

I went to see David in a delightful production of the play at the little Dell theatre in Stratford last summer. He played a superb Feste and his Feste in turn played a fine Sir Topaz.

And remember that Sir Thopas was the hero of the interrupted Canterbury Tale  told so badly by Geoffrey Chaucer the pilgrim that Harry Bailey the host accused him of boring the assembled pilgrims. Telling him

“By God,” quod he, “for pleynly at a word

Thy drasty rymyng is nat worth a toord,

Change quod to quoth or said and recognise that drasty means worthless (from the same root as dregs) and you don’t need too much more translation. Some modern slang words are older than you think.

A line of verse, and old speech from a play I was in years ago, something someone once said. Significant ideas come unbidden to the mind. This is what I most like about cycling. It allows the clearest of thinking and plenty of time to do it. You can cycle for an hour or ten hours at a time and never become bored of your own company; because you are never alone. You’re with the thoughts that you haven’t finished thinking yet. The thoughts from other occasions. You’re with the people who said them, wrote them, thought them originally and you’ve got time and inclination to make them make sense.

It’s no surprise that cyclists; who don’t tend to come from the privileged and educated ranks; write superbly well. Paul Kimmage brought me to reading about bicyclists twenty five years ago and I still look out anything he puts down on paper. There are many others. Matt Seaton, who is educated and could write well anyway, found new heights in contemplation and prose, when he set out on his bicycle. Einstein simply said that he had his best thoughts when riding his bike. It is an exercise for both body and mind. Whatever I have become is a few stages further on from what I would have been if I hadn’t taken to two wheels and the quieter roads.

Little kiosks, like sentry boxes act as mileposts, where bored young people wait to sell potatoes and strawberries to stopping motorists. Fields shared by horses and cattle, motels that smell of new carpets and a constant flow of English cars, packed with families, already grim faced from hours of being shut up together, making their first miles into Ireland and thinking  that it looks a lot like the outskirts of Swindon.

And I reach the port and swing down across the flat macadam, up a slope and into the booking hall. I’ve ninety minutes to spare as the day and the Irish part of my journey  come to an end.

 

Day 179: God’s Executioner

Tags

Drogheda, New Model Army, Oliver Cromwell, Padraig Lenihan, Professor John Merrill, Siege of Wexford, Sir Peter Lely

A Journey Around the British Isles … Part 73

There’s one more sad story to tell before I get ready to leave these shores, and that story has Wexford at its centre. As I walk along the bustling streets and fishing boat quays of this friendly town, there is little to show of events about as dreadful as any witnessed on these islands in the last thousand years.

In 1649 Wexford was the site of a second massacre in Ireland in the space of a month. The terrible brutality of the massacre at Drogheda is well known and justified by historians on the grounds that it was, in line with the rules of battle in the seventeenth century, and that it was intended to save bloodshed later on. It was the same moral argument that was used in dropping the atomic bomb on Japan in 1945. It was agreed that it was a terrible thing to do, but it is also conceded that it shortened the war and saved maybe a million American and Japanese lives. It sent out the massage that we have a fearsome fighting machine and if you don’t surrender, this is what will happen. The action at Wexford didn’t shorten any war and it led on to enormous loss of life.

Wexford was different from Drogheda on a number of points, though the scale of the massacre and the inclusion of many innocent civilians is on a par. Over two thousand men women and children were put to the sword. An eye witness* spoke of how the English soldiers used children as human shields to reach the surrendering Irish. One young woman was ‘saved’ from the crypt of the church  (hundreds were seeking sanctuary), where she was found taking refuge. A gallant English soldier carried her outside where she was run through by another soldier. Our hero simply robbed her of her money and jewels and threw her, still alive, over the works.

Negotiations for surrender were ongoing at the time of the first killings and it is felt that either Cromwell lost control of his soldiers or he chose to turn a blind eye to what was happening. If we continue the analogy with the second world war, then Wexford is the second bomb, the one dropped on the city of Nagasaki after, by many accounts, the Japanese military command had already agreed to surrender. One massacre sends out a ferocious message. Two is, in the words of Cambridge professor of history, John Merrill, altogether, “more problematic”.

In strictly military terms the results were mixed. Some towns did surrender without a fight. Others fought on all the more strongly reasoning that there is no point in surrender to an army hell-bent on wholesale slaughter. The town was totally destroyed. The port, which had been home to a fleet of privateers who had caused English shipping a great deal of harm, was burned to the ground.

I recall a conversation in County Clare during a previous visit. It was in the 1980s. Before the IRA ceasefire and the Good Friday Agreement. I was there with a guitar and tin whistle to visit friends and to make some music in the bars of Doolin and Lisdoonvarna and on the island of Inisheer. I had played very little having been overwhelmed by the vastly superior musicianship and folk knowledge of the boys who ran the sessions. There were a smattering of Germans and Americans and a whole host of Dutch folk. For the most part though, they were Irish, and a good number were Clare born and bred. For most of my visit all was well and a gauche young me presumed that my friendly love of all things Irish, and a solid working class pedigree, would help me to fit in. And then I met Peadar. For a while I thought he didn’t like me.

“Look you English c***!” (I might have some reason behind my thinking) “Just because you know a few Chieftains’ songs and you’ve read f***ing Ulysses doesn’t mean we like you.”

I’d drunk two pints of Guinness over and above my coherence level and, though this left me unable to defend myself, it gave me the appearance of having the grace to accept what was coming at me. What was coming at me wasn’t as personal as it sounded. It was directed at my race; my Englishness.

“We’ve had eight hundred f***ing years of you all coming over here, knowing what’s best, taking what you like and leaving f*** all behind for Paddy. We’ve had it up to here with your Strongbow and your Pale and that tw** Cromwell.”

It went on for a goodly while. He’d said it before and I heard him giving it to another whey-faced fellow from Surrey a couple of days later.

My friend Laurence left me to sit on the skewer for a while and then jumped to my defence.

“Oh, you got the wrong Englishman here Peadar. This one is from many generations of the poorhouse, the workhouse and the begging in the street. I’ve met his grandmother, grand woman, still drinking her tea from a jam jar and waiting for yesterday’s rolls from the bakery.” It was all lies but Laurence liked words to fit the occasion. Someone began beating the rhythm of a reel on the bodhran , the tension lifted and we were all soon clattering through ‘The Gravel Walk’.

The reason why I remember it now is the mention of the word Cromwell. Irish readers are all too aware of why the name and the man is hated all over the island. We English are sometimes a little over-protected from our history when that history happened across the sea. Cromwell is a name to get a debate or two going in a Derbyshire pub or a  College seminar room in Norwich. The debate would concern his military success with his New Model Army, his lasting contribution to democracy and limiting the power of the monarch (in his case by having one beheaded). The thing most known about him in this country is that he told the painter Peter Lely to “paint me, warts and all.”

Lely did but English historians often tend to use a little blending powder on Cromwell’s time in Ireland.

I recall another conversation when, as an 18 year old I’d stayed over at a friend’s house, and while his Irish mother was serving up a generous breakfast, I asked her about why the Irish seemed to hate Cromwell. She came from County Wexford. She simply replied, “We don’t talk about that devil in this house.”

It was the end of the conversation and the beginning of my curiosity.

You can generally tell which side the historian is on when telling of Cromwell’s time in Ireland. If the casualty figures are outrageous but accompanied by discordant words like, ‘merely’ or ‘only’, then you are reading an English friendly version. If the figures are three times as many , then you are getting the Irish side.  We don’t have exact figures but we are getting closer. According to Dr Padraig Lenihan of the University of Limerick, “The human cost was enormous. Between one fifth and one quarter of the civilian population perished in the years 1649, 1650, 51, 52 and into 1653. That is Cromwell’s legacy”

The figures are not disputed. When you add to these figures, which match statistically the killing fields of Cambodia in the 1970s, a further one hundred thousand Irishmen taken to the Americas as slaves (bonded servants), and thousands more who were obliged (under threat of death) to leave for Holland, France and Spain, the devastation is frightening. Catholics were forbidden to have land rights and many were removed to Connacht and Clare. The saying of Mass was prevented and a scorched earth policy led to terrible famine and the destruction of crops and arable farmland.

Cromwell’s actions were motivated by an enormous feeling of doing God’s will combined with a hatred of Catholicism and the Irish. He wanted to punish the ‘heathens’ for massacres he believed had been committed on Protestants in the north in 1641. And he wanted to prevent Ireland becoming a friendly nation with England’s enemies. At that time this largely meant Spain.

Whatever the justifications or the motivations, the legacy has been one of hatred and discontent. According to John Merrill, “The biggest single reason for problems in Ireland and for problems between Britain and Ireland ever since.”

*for further eye witness evidence see Paul Johnson A Concise History of Ireland

Day 178: Fellow Traveller

Tags

bicycle tour, cycle tour of ireland, Horace Walpole, serendipity, Wexford

A Journey Around the British Isles … Part 72

And so we continue, in tandem when the road demands, side by side in the sunshine when traffic allows. I like serendipity. I like the word; one of the many beautiful things we have to thank Sri Lanka for. I like the meaning of the word. OED: the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way:a fortunate stroke of serendipity. I like the fact that the word was first coined by Horace Walpole, a man who wrote a rather brilliant but entirely bizarre gothic novel (The Castle of Otranto) and was the son of Britain’s first ever prime minister. Most of all I like serendipitous events and meeting my fellow cyclist was entirely that. The modern word would be happenstance which is fine, but it isn’t serendipity.

If he hadn’t set off two hours later than his normal time; if I hadn’t decided to make a run for the coast; if the ladies in the New Ross tourist office had been either more (quite easy) or less (virtually impossible) helpful, I would have been either five minutes in front (in which case he would easily have caught me up) or five minutes behind (in which case he would have needed to suffer several punctures to allow me to catch up), we never would have met. I cannot remember his name; I obviously knew it well enough not to make a special note of it; and we haven’t kept in touch. It was an example of a friendship that sprang up out of common ground and disappeared as we went our separate ways. That’s perhaps the way it ought to be. But I include a photograph. If you read this I’d be delighted to say thank you for your companionship, your conversation, your insights into Ireland that I gained along the way and largely lost through fading powers of recall, and for your kind hospitality in Wexford.

My notes simply say, “I’ll detail the conversation elsewhere”. The notes were written in the small hours of the night in a deserted Welsh ferry port after no sleep and an 80 mile fast cycle. The details were never written down and eighteen months have passed. I’ve tried to use a mixture of memory and imagination to re-capture it but it doesn’t work. This was a real conversation between two real people and I enjoyed it enormously because of that. I’ve written it out as an entertaining dialogue between two cyclists on the road across County Wexford but it is a work of fiction and I admired this man too much to put words into his mouth. The dialogue may have some future use but it won’t work here.

I do remember that we talked of our families, of both going through times of hardship and both finding that the supposed bottom was a lot better place to be than the top we had been cheated of. He’d been offered contracts that would have left him wealthy and then found wealth in his family and the charitable work he does with old people. He could tell a tale that had a wheezing cyclist bursting his sides with laughter. He had a bead on the Irish economy. He’d understood the tiger and withstood its demise.

If anything we covered the second part of the journey even faster than the first. “Follow me home if you fancy a hot cup of tea and a place to park your bicycle for an hour or two. You can have a walk around Wexford and add another city to your list. You’d be most welcome. If you don’t fancy it, just keep on this big road. It’ll bring you round to Rosslare Harbour. But you’re hours before your sailing, and I can tell you, there isn’t a great deal once you get out there.”

I take the only option I was ever going to take and follow him off the bypass and down a thunderingly fast descent towards the city centre. Or try to follow him. Before I’ve gone a hundred yards he’s disappeared out of sight and I’m wondering if I’ve been the victim of a practical joke when he bobs up again to my left.

“You took a wrong turning there. Follow me down this way.”

I wasn’t aware that I had taken any turning at all. But I followed him more closely this time. We were flying and the panniers were rattling fit to fall. Left, right, right, left and we’re passing a church with an elegant spire and a chip shop with a very Italian name and he’s pulling up and immediately finding himself in a fight with his daughters.

They’d been worried about him. He hadn’t told them he was away out on his bike and they hadn’t a clue where he was. The strong admonishments are a  sign of caring but the gormless twerp he’d brought home with him was an obvious target for their spleen. I feel a strong desire to be elsewhere. Daughter number one is curt and censorious. Daughter number two is quicker to see that there really are no villains in the situation. My cycling friend is unfussed, genial and calmly invites me in. The kettle goes on and daughter number one is able to get on with her day safe in the knowledge that her dad isn’t lying under a lorry on the side of a Wexford highway.

The tea is wonderful and the conversation rolls on. The youngest daughter, who is studying nursing in Leeds hand has just completed a placement at Huddersfield, makes me tea while yer man is busy with the stove and the grill and soon presents two plates of bacon, sausage and burger with rounds of bread and butter. I must admit that I feel a    hint of being a nuisance but the hospitality is so warm and natural. They both seem more than happy that I am there and in need of a spot of lunch.

“I was saying to Simon that he could leave his bicycle here and go and have a look around the town. His boat isn’t sailing until tonight.”

“He’s more than welcome. Now, would you like a nice shower while you’re here? I’ll look you out a towel.”

Once again the offer is without condition and the shower feels wonderful. I have new boxers and socks in my bag and they feel like putting on a new skin.The only drawback is having to put the dirty polo shirt back on afterwards. The brilliant yellow shirt, that proclaims my allegiance to Kilkenny, has lost some of its morning newness in looks and a great deal in texture. I’m waved off by two fine people as I make my way into the town of Wexford with directions to the nearest clothing store.

Day 177: Wexford Ho!

Tags

cycle tour of ireland, famine ship, Luke Kelly, New Ross, The Woman From Wexford, Wexford

A Cycle Around the British Isles … Part 71

The weight of history is too strong for me in New Ross. I quite like the look of the town but I don’t like the way I feel. It’s too early in the day to be thinking of finding a hotel and I’m now within a last, long ride of the ferry port. I have no desire at all to say goodbye to Ireland but I have a very strong sense of how much I’d like to be at home. My desire to stay in New Ross takes a dent as I try to pop into the tourist office to find out some information. Normally this isn’t a action fraught with problems.

The office has two staff and two functions. One is to tell tourists things that tourists may have a wish to know. In many parts of the world this function is catered for by having a well informed, and almost invariably polite, person answering questions. Here in New Ross they have already decided what tourists need to know and they need to know about the famine ship. This leads directly to the second function of the office: getting money off people. They are good at it. It is all of the no-nonsense “give us your f***ing money” type of dealing. And a long queue of visitors are not the first to be relieved of their savings in order to be unceremoniously marched aboard a sailing ship at the quay.

The down side of all of this is that they have very little time for me. I want to know the times of sailings from Rosslare. They see no advantage in telling me. In fact they find a tourist, with a genuine need for information, to be something of a nuisance. I was also hoping to find out if there is a little ferry from here to Wexford. My map has a broken blue line that suggests that such a thing is possible. I rather fancy a boat ride around the coast; particularly as the alternative is forty miles of pedalling along a motorway.

When I do get some advice it is, as it was in Ballinasloe, rather less than useless. They tell me that you cannot just turn up and buy a ticket and give me a number for the wrong ferry company. It’s enough information to make me wobble with worry but the man on the ferry line end of the phone is helpfulness itself. There’s a choice of sailings this evening depending on where in Wales I want to be set down and of course I can just ride in and buy a ticket.

All morning I have been aware of and constantly thinking about the road to Wexford. On the map it looks like I’ve got no choice. Thirty miles of dual carriageway. Not a thing I would choose at any time and certainly not the way I want to say goodbye to a country I feel an enormous affinity towards.

The one consolation of taking a motorway out of town is that it doesn’t take much finding.  Simply follow the road from the quayside south and soon I’m skirting the last of the houses and getting ready for what looks a considerable climb. Welcome to County Wexford. And for a while that is the problem. I cannot get the song Woman From Wexford out of my head and the ear worm insists on jangling it in the worst faux bog Irish singing voice it can manage. It must be thirty years since I sang it and I can remember every verse. It tells its story well, and I ride out of town under the guise of Luke Kelly.

The road reminds me of home as well. There can be few roads that do a more accurate impression of the M1 between West Bretton and Meadowhall. Just before I get to the start of the first hill I pass a cyclist going the other way. I’m reasonably friendly but I am very much not a member of the lycra boys club. I therefore am not usually the first to wave in acknowledgment of our bicycling bond. Today I do and am happy to be waved at in return. The fellow is about my age and is riding a steel framed bike.

The hill is just a bit too much. I can manage the slope and the duration, I just cannot manage it with a full bladder. A convenient gate and several hundred acres of rolling greenery affords much welcome relief. As I get back on my bike the fellow cyclist is coming up alongside. Uphill isn’t the place for conversation. We manage a cheery “Hello”, a smile and he slowly rides off into the distance. I’m quite happy about this. Simon’s Rule Number One applies. If someone is wearing cycling togs for cycling or swimming goggles for swimming they are either very good or are taking it too seriously.

I remount and make my pedestrian way to the summit. On the next descent I catch him up and we begin to talk. It soon becomes obvious that I have once again dropped lucky on this journey. For someone who doesn’t go out of his way to make acquaintance, I certainly meet some fine people.

“No. You saw me getting there. I like a run to New Ross and back on a Sunday before the road gets busy. I’m a bit late today that’s why you found me.”

“I live in Wexford. Is that the way you’re going?”

He invites me to tag on. This entails him pulling well in front every time we reach an upslope and me coming back on the downhill bits. We’re going a good clip faster than I would choose for myself. He’s an awful lot fitter than he looks and I’m the exact opposite.

“I don’t know Sheffield very well, but I have a daughter who’s training in Huddersfield.”

“I lived in Huddersfield for years.”

“Do you know the Royal Infirmary? That’s where she works”

“Know it! I had my left wrist plastered there and my right hand strapped. Different times you know. I was a little accident prone when I lived in the town.”

“It seems nice enough when we go over there to see her.”

With the rolling hills of Wexford allowing us a concertinaed conversation; he pulls away on the hills and slows to allow me to catch up on the other side; we make good progress. We cover 16 miles in the first hour. That would be a good session for me on the flat, without heavy bags and without already having forty miles in my legs that day.

“What time’s your boat?”

“Nine o’clock.”

“Sure, you’ve got hours to kill.”

“I’ll be happier once I’ve got the ticket in my hand.”

“If you want to, when we get to Wexford, you can leave your bike at my house. Then you’ll be able to have a good look around the town.”

We’ve still got miles to go but the day seems to be panning out as nicely as the panoramic landscapes from the top of the hills. If you ignore the enormous road running straight through it, this county looks something like a pastoral ideal.

Day 176: an Gorta Mór

Tags

Dunbrody, famine, famine ships, Ireland, New Ross, population of Ireland, potato famine

A Journey Around the British Isles … Part 70

The population of Ireland in 2012 was approximately 6.4 million. The population in 1841 was approximately 8.1 million. There is no other country on the planet that can produce similar figures. Something terrible and something avoidable happened here that changed everything about the country. There is no crueller death than starvation other than to starve, and see those you love and care for, starve before your eyes. Terrible famines have punctuated human history but this one reverberates with senseless wrong, cruelty and an overwhelming sadness. At the height of the hunger Ireland was producing enough crops to feed the entire population, granaries were full and kept locked and over £6 million a year was being collected in rents from the impoverished Irish and sent across the water to absentee landlords in England.

Over a million people died in their homes, on the roads and by-ways, in the blighted fields, outside the houses of the wealthy. A further million emigrated. The country had been on the verge of starvation for hundreds of years, had been dreadfully served by a British parliament, had suffered under laws that made catastrophe inevitable and had stayed loyal to its British rulers during that whole period. The famine changed all of that.

The optimist will often look into the darkest cloud and see a silver lining. Only a cynic would do the same about the famine. No matter what the future brought, and it was hardly a future of milk and honey, the price was too dreadful.

British rule over Ireland happened in stages. It began during the reign of Henry II when an army led by a number of Norman Knights overcame the King of Leinster. The invaders were under the leadership of Richard de Clare, otherwise known as Strongbow. A larger scale invasion followed and for 800 years the country strained under an English yoke. Some historians seek to diminish the English culpability in the troubles of Ireland. I find this hard to swallow. Being guilty of appalling acts that led to centuries of suffering is bad enough. To adopt a revisionist view of history; to say it was never our intention; to wash our hands makes me feel deeply ashamed  in the same way that I am deeply ashamed to be part of a country whose wealth was in significant part, built on the slave trade. Ashamed of these parts of our history, not ashamed of the entire history. We’ve done a lot of good in our time.

And it was the same classes of people who did it. The wealthy merchant classes and the aristocracy. Those we are still told to look up to. Those who, once again we have made our leaders even though, once again, they have brought enormous pain and suffering down upon the ordinary people. Be they eighteenth century plantation owners and shipping magnates, nineteenth century absentee landlords or twenty first century capitalist bankers, the crimes are real and they remain largely free from punishment whilst the pain is taken by the poor and the weak. Centuries of poverty and exploitation had left the Irish tenant farmers and their families weaker than anyone else in the entire continent. A royal commission in the 1840s set out its view that the “patient endurance which the labouring classes have exhibited under sufferings greater, we believe, than the people of any other country in Europe have to sustain.” Historian Robert Kee puts forward the painful opinion that if the famine had hit anywhere else in Europe, the death toll would have been much greater. That the Irish endured it better simply because they were used to coping with the unendurable.

The cause is put down to blight in the potato crop, and this may well be true. Farms and small holdings had been so sub-divided, by exploitative landlords, as to make potatoes the only crop that could sustain a family. The failure of the crop wasn’t the cause but the inevitable effect of years of failure to look after the population, of mis-rule, mismanagement and a total lack, in modern legal terminology, of the duty of care the British government and landowners owed to the people of Ireland. To highlight this point, a fact. During the height of the famine between thirty and fifty ships sailed from Irish ports every day with their holds full of food.

Some historians see the famine as an unfortunate failure in agriculture. Others view it as genocide.

For those who survived, the situation was just about as bad as can be imagined. I still find myself feeling sad about the death of my father. He died peacefully in his sleep at the age of 89 after a full and successful life. The famine survivors had seen their loved ones die the most painful deaths before their eyes, had endured unbelievable suffering and now had nowhere to turn. For decades the solution had been emigration. The famine accelerated this process. There are fewer than 7 million souls living on the island today. There are over 100 million Irish living elsewhere. Of every one hundred people born in Ireland in the second half of the nineteenth century, forty permanently left their native land.

Ulster and Leinster were less badly hit. Though relative comparisons of suffering are meaningless here. It would be more fitting to say that the greater horrors were to be found in Connacht and Munster. The further west or the further south the worse the hunger.

I’d stood on the hard in Sligo next to a haunting statue of a famine family. Throughout my journey I had never been far from a famine story, a village that had been destroyed and field where someone died. At New Ross there are two monuments, and I’m not at all sure how I feel about either.

Against the quayside fully rigged, The Dunbrody looks almost ready to sail. Built in the twentieth century with money from the JFK Foundation, it is a replica of the ships used in the mass emigration and a museum to the times. These ships weren’t the end of the story. Finding the money to get on board was not the end of your troubles. Twenty per cent of passengers died on the six week trans Atlantic voyages to a new life. 20% went unquestioned. Questions were only asked if the figure went over fifty per cent. Conditions were dreadful. Some of these ships had been used as slave vessels. Survival rates were often higher on slave crossings where profits were dependent on the number of living souls arriving in port.

Further down the quay is a statue of John Fitzgerald Kennedy along with many photographs as he stood on the quayside in New Ross in June 1963. Kennedy was one of the 100 million. He may have stood for something that America gained through the famine ships that took his family from County Wexford to New England. Many countries gained immeasurably from an influx of the Irish. Their gain was Ireland’s loss. As I stand by the River Barrow in New Ross I feel most dreadfully sad.

Day 175: Travels To My Aunt

Tags

fish pilau, Heston Blumenthal, Iris Murdoch, Little Chef, Morrison's Halfway, Robert Kee, Teesside, Withnail and I

Mostly concerning food.

Tuesday is a perfect day of dog walks and reading. As a sideline to this blog I asked if anyone had any suggestions for novels rich in food. Paul suggested The Sea, The Sea and I’m already contemplating doing a Withnail. Doing a Withnail involves watching the film and matching Richard E Grant’s character drink for drink. It never much appealed to me in my drinking days. It also seems to show a fundamental misunderstanding of the movie. You are supposed to be charmed by the man but at the same time find him repellent. Joining him in a drinking game seems to be using him as a role model and that wouldn’t be a good idea. Matching Charles Arrowby meal for meal over a period of some weeks feels like an altogether better idea. Though he seems to be almost as weird as Uncle Monty. I spend the morning with Iris Murdoch’s world of theatrical memories and, in the afternoon, allow Robert Kee to unfold the history of Ireland to me. Discovering new stuff is always a treat but I’m pleased to discover that I already have a certain expertise through travels and previous research. It’s nice to know stuff.

 

I enjoyed Cosmo’s risotto on Monday and knock up a quick vegetable and white fish pilau for two. It’s a remarkably simple dish. Soften chopped onions in a good slosh of oil in a wok. Add chopped peppers and then well washed basmati rice. I throw in a chopped tomato and a couple of teaspoons of gram masala. It’s been a while since I worried the spice rack. Cook it thoroughly with the oil and add some water and some frozen chicken stock. One the stock has melted, I add two fillets of white fish from the freezer and top up the water as it gets absorbed. Just before the rice is cooked, I add a handful of spinach leaves. The fish gets forked into flakes and the pilau beats yesterday’s risotto into a cocked hat.

 

 

I’m not sure if grating cheese on the top would please the purists but I’ve grown very fond of this pecorino and it works for me.

 

This gets followed by a slice of the Oven Door’s generous cream cake. Discovering a really good bakers sets a dilemma. Why bother with baking when you have cakes and bread this good on your doorstep?

 

Wednesday I go and see my Auntie . She’s always been a favourite relation. She is constantly happy, consistently nice and never judgmental. She’s always a pleasure to see.

Getting there involves driving up the A1 and meeting my sister  near Knaresborough. I get a series of texts and have to pull into a Little Chef to respond. It promises the advantage of making up for a missed breakfast. I order the coffee and bacon sandwich special and get some hot brown liquid in a carry out beaker and a tasteless roll with a lonely rasher. It could be the first bacon sandwich that I have ever left unfinished. The coffee suffers a similar fate. The last time I heard of Little Chef restaurants, Heston Blumenthal was supposed to be revving up their recipes. The sterile open spaces, the empty tables and the food on offer suggests that his revolution hasn’t yet reached Hampole.

Perhaps the worst bacon sandwich I’ve ever eaten (part of)

I leave my car (T’s car) at a retail park. (I buy three bottles of bubble bath at Boot’s, as my contribution, as the parking is free). My sister has an altogether smarter and classier car. She’s also inherited the family cheerful gene and we catch up as we head towards Teesside. It’s a pleasant journey with North Yorkshire passing with Dales to the left and Moors to the right. She has a printout of directions. As usual they are written by someone who knows computer software but has never been to Stockton. We should have got hopelessly lost but end up outside Cousin N’s flats as much by happy chance as through navigation. We see no reason to change a winning formula and allow instinct to locate my aunt’s flat in Norton.

 

It is a treat to see them both and we talk about times past and times to come. She has an appointment and cannot join us for lunch which my sister has booked in a country pub which we find via a smartphone. We don’t find the quickest route.

 

Ive never been a huge fan of food in pubs. Cafés are either greasy spoon (which I like) or run by someone with a bit of flair and imagination (which I also like). Restaurants and hotels tend to have kitchen staff who have been trained. There are pubs where the food is worth travelling for but many have tired imitations of proper food. The menus are too extensive for the number of covers they do and they tend to be over reliant on réchauffer dishes and the awful microwave.

The landlord has a very loud, well starched blue shirt to go with his lank grey ponytail. The waiter is polite and obliging and largely clueless. The food is perfectly acceptable.

We start with a warm salad of pigeon breast. There is a rule with these. The frizzier the lettuce the lesser the salad. Here the lettuce startles in appearance.

For mains N enjoys a creamy fish pie with nice mashed potatoes. My sister has a burger and I go for the fish and chips. The menu assures me that the fish is line caught. I take its word for it.

The puds are fine. The Teesside Mess looks fun. My sticky toffee pudding is a decent steamed pud though the sauce has rather gone on the run. I’ve tried to ignore Mr and Mrs McBigot who have been seated close enough to easily punch (something I feel an ever increasing urge to do). As well as sharing their views on immigration and social security she also sports the most unpleasant mouth on Teesside. Don’t they have dentists up here? Or toothpaste?

Despite this we enjoy an agreeable hour.

We go back to town where my Auntie has completed her errands and we enjoy the rest of the afternoon in family chatter, chuckles, reminiscences and altogether good company. She’s that sort of an auntie

 

On Thursday T wants to visit Morrison’s. She pushes a trolley and I sit down to their big breakfast. I like the Morrison’s at Halfway in Sheffield. I like the people who serve there and the people who eat there. The food isn’t amazing but it does the job. The place is open, airy and clean. The breakfast completes a week of eating food cooked for me and sees me well into the afternoon.

 

The evening’s treat is ice cream and banana and pear with a couple of little biscuits. This is more like it.

 

The party is over by Friday. I’ve eaten altogether too much and altogether the wrong stuff. The main reason for eating at home is that you know what you are eating. I’m not over well by Friday morning and in need of simple fare. Toast, real butter, marmalade, good coffee. Simple, satisfying, tasty…perfect. I’ve enjoyed my jaunts, been nice to catch up with films and family and friends. I’m now ready to enjoy simple food well cooked and the company of a loyal and enthusiastic sheepdog and two cats and a wife who is going to continue the teaching tradition and look forward to coming home to find her tea made for her.

 

 

I think I’m going to enjoy being a pensioner.

Day 174: The Last Half Holiday

Tags

Christmas Cake, Cosmo restaurant, croissants, Dallas Buyers Club, Elgin Marbles, George Clooney, Matthew McConaughey, Mud

It was meant to be a restful week; a last week’s holiday on the payroll before retirement starts in earnest. It has been a busy week, a funny week, a full scale full-time stretch of a week. There’s been some activity on the blog and for those of you who have tuned in for the next episode of cyclist explores Hibernia, I ought to explain that Saturday has become food day. The whole thing is evolving and is developing in ways I enjoy. At heart though, it is a daily letter to my children, letting them know what is happening at home.

I’m enjoying writing up a travelogue of my journey around Ireland and am looking forward to having the time to re-draft it to see if there is anything there worth taking further. I’m looking froward to continuing a study of the changing tastes in children’s literature. I’m looking forward to writing about the British education system from a detached but informed position. I’m looking forward to developing a play script about one of my fellow northerners and a short story about the meeting of two unusual literary figures; one a little read poet and the other a multi-million selling author of sex books. But first, I’m looking froward to having a good rest.

I’ve always liked half term holidays. A week is a proper length of time. I had no real objection to  two weeks at Christmas and Easter and  six weeks in the summer, but the half hols were the best.

I’ve tried to keep up a decent diet during my teaching time but the winter  and the long hours have taken their toll. I haven’t spent anything like as long in the kitchen as I want to.I need salad. I’ve eaten endless apples, oranges, pears, grapefruit, bananas and other fruit but I haven’t had an avocado in months. I’m also down on fresh tomatoes. This salad cuts through winter like a day’s sunshine. The above ingredients get chopped roughly into the salad below.

And get served using leaves of cos lettuce (romaine to the cultured) as both cutlery and crockery. No oil, but plenty of ground black pepper. There is plenty of other provender on the table but this does for me, and does me no end of good. An afternoon lying on a sunny beach wouldn’t have pleased me more.

But it is still winter, and I believe in following the seasons and eating seasonal food. We decide that we are unlikely to have better cause to open up the Christmas cake that never got marzipan or icing. It’s been sitting in a tin, all wrapped up and left on the shelf. I experimented with this one and put in far more fresh orange juice than I have seen in any recipe. It is moist and delicious. It makes for a fine end to a tea for two special and then becomes my snack of choice whenever hunger nibbles at me during the week. Forgetting it was a very happy accident.

For the first few days we try to have a different breakfast each day. Toast and marmalade is my current favourite breakfast. We’ve tried all sorts of croissants over the years. I got to eating them by the packet and my weight ballooned. These days we generally have them when there is at least one of the children around to help us out. Today I can no longer resist the clever little tin from jus-rol. I’ve never had these before. T remembers them fondly from childhood. It is worth it for the way the tim pops open and the dough releases itself. The end products are fine and I’d go as far as to say nice with plenty of plum jam. The kitchen smells nice. I’ve had better croissants but I think I’ll keep a tin in the cupboard for emergencies when nothing other than a French breakfast will do.

The days get filled with films. This time of year all the hot tips for Oscars and Baftas are in the multiplexes. It’s been a good year. We hit gold with Dallas Buyers Club on Saturday. For years Matthew McConaughey has been a perfect reason to give a film a miss. And then came Mud last year which I rate as about my favourite film of 2013 and now this. He is also the best thing in Wolf of Wall Street. In fact, if you haven’t yet seen Wolf of Wall Street I recommend you call it quits once Mr McConaughey leaves the screen.

On Sunday we get the pleasing and heart-warming Monuments Men. It has given George Clooney the opportunity to do the media rounds and appear on radio 4 saying Britain ought to give the Elgin Marbles back to Greece (something I have long been in favour of). It also gave the radio 4 presenters the opportunity to be patronising about an actor having a view and to be downright condescending about the way he pronounced Elgin. We enjoy the film.

On Monday we have to go to the Showroom (arts cinema) to see the Charles Dickens biopic The Invisible Woman. This means a trip into the middle of Sheffield and the search for somewhere for a cheap and cheerful meal. A new chain has opened promising to take buffet dining to a new level. the waitress is helpful and very determined to do her job right (in the way that suggests aggressive management watching everyone). I thoroughly enjoy four courses. First some passable seafood risotto which I cannot resist garnishing with salad and pickles.

The place is big and clean and efficient with an enormous choice of decent food. It fills up. At £7.99 for as much as you want, I’m not surprised. You can find yourself with some pretty unsavoury neighbours in these places, but today we have little parties of work colleagues, families from a wider range of cultural backgrounds than there is food on offer, couples who stare at each other while eating (not us), couples who talk to each other whilst eating (us), students and teachers.

I enjoy some sushi, then a tasty rogan josh with rice that looked more exciting than it tasted.

We didn’t match each other dish for dish but we hit the pudding section simultaneously and both agreed that this was the best part of the meal. T managed a selection of little cakes and fruit. I enjoyed a good slice of chocolate cake with a side order of panna cotta. For both quality and quantity there were no grumbles.

I can’t tell you too much about the film as I slept through half of it.

Tuesday began with soft boiled eggs and slices of bread with real butter and cups of Yorkshire Gold tea. It was only eight in the morning and the day had peaked. There has been altogether too much interesting food this week to fit into one day. The cycle ride from New Ross  to Wexford is going to have to wait until Monday. My first proper day as a retired teacher.

Day 173: Without a Hand to Hold

Tags

Bennettsbridge, John Martyn, may you never, New Ross, salmon fishing, St Nicholas, Thomastown, trout streams

A Journey Around the British Isles … Part 69

You are always in the countryside on the R700 but never far from houses; many of them new. Bungalows with enough lawn to imitate a demesne, and a small wall, turreted to play at lords of the manor. Flying the flag is as popular here as in other counties. I pass several red and green stripes of County Mayo and wonder why the owners have chosen to live in Kilkenny. It is a handsome flag. Though the little lordling who had also painted his defensive wall red and green may have crossed the line between pride and bad taste.

Bennettsbridge is still sleeping as I trundle through. It has a fine and lovely crossing which, like many on the Nore dates from the 1760s; its predecessor having been swept away by the great flood of 1763. It must have been quite a torrent. The town is quietly clustered about the river. It has become something of a craft centre in recent years and boasts several potteries including one imaginatively called Stoneware Jackson; presumably a deliberate pun on the Confederate General. Not necessarily a name I would choose. Apart from being on the side of slavery and being victorious in many battles, he is largely remembered as having success in a lost cause.

As you leave the town you pass a curiously military police station. Curious in that it obviously dates to the early twentieth century yet its defences are of a medieval flavour. Were battlements necessary in the fight against Republicanism? It adds character to the little town.

Thomastown is the next place the road crosses the Nore. I’ve now covered enough ground to treat myself to a little walk round. It still feels very peaceful even though Sunday morning is approaching eleven. There is no rush at all. The town is the final resting place of two people I have an enormous amount of time for. One symbolises the genius of being a giving and caring soul and the other the wilful pig-headed genius of going your own way. Jerpoint Abbey is reputed to hold the remains of St Nicholas. Yes, that St Nicholas, the one who, to the accompanying tunes of Bruce Springsteen, Maria Carey and the Beach Boys comes down your chimney every twenty fifth of December and leaves stockings filled with giving. He wasn’t Irish, never came to Ireland, but when Irish Norman Crusaders returned to the Abbey in the twelfth century, they brought the saint’s remains back with them.

Iain David McGeachy spent his last years living on the banks of the Nore, composing songs of an exquisite beauty that seemed at odds with the rather wilful, selfish persona he put across over forty years of being the guitarist’s favourite guitarist and the songwriter’s favourite songwriter under the name of John Martyn. His single minded approach to how he wanted to live his life can be shown in his declining years when he was told that if he didn’t give up drinking he would lose his leg. He chose the drink that had brought him enormous pleasure over the years. My memories are of wondering how anyone can smoke quite that much marijuana on stage and still produce such wonderful music. His song “May You Never” is a work of consummate beauty, his album Grace and Danger changed my whole thoughts on singer songwriters. It no longer seemed enough to have a nice voice and a caring attitude to the world. Jackson Browne was out and I spent a year or two singing Sweet Little Mystery. He replaced the hippy dippy approach with some hurt, some pain and some earthy life experience that had, until then, been the preserve of the best country music and the blues. Like Hank Williams and Tim Hardin, he wasn’t always the easiest to get on with, but my, did he leave behind a set of records worth listening to.

I’ve known lots of people who were affable and amiable, and lots of people who have lived a safe and sober life. I have known a good number of drunken bores and followers of fashion. I haven’t come across many who did it their way as clearly, as successfully and as painfully as John Martyn. His spirit is resting somewhere in this valley and I hope it has found a hand to hold. Maybe St Nick’s. They were both ultimately people who gave.

Thomastown is also the first place that morning that I witness what seems to be a very Irish tradition. Fly fishing from a public road.

This section of the River Nore is famous for its salmon and trout. I don’t know the laws and rules of this activity. What I do know is that rights are either jealously guarded or sold at a very high price in Great Britain. It is the sport of the toff and the laird. Gamekeepers and ghillies are employed to take strong armed action against anyone found taking a salmon from the rivers of great estates. Poaching is very much looked down upon.

I’m not sure how it works. I don’t think anyone can own a river but you can own the river banks. All fishing must ultimately rely on using the riverbanks and therefore the riparian owners are able effectively to own the river and the rights to fish it. I presume the same is the case in Ireland, and yet here, I have regularly found anglers openly casting their flies from bridges. Are bridges not the public highway? Are anglers not therefore within their rights to anything they may catch from there? Certainly I had seen happy fisherfolk making their casts in Sligo, in Roscommon, in Leitrim and I saw them all the way down the River Nore. As they might say around here, “Fair play to you”. I once ate sea trout almost straight from the river and into a skillet. I don’t think I have ever eaten anything finer.

I wonder if I could begin a trend to fish England’s trout steams from its bridges. I’d have to learn how to fish before I could even think about beginning.

The road leaves the banks and heads up onto higher ground between Thomastown and New Ross. By now my legs are fully warmed and though I can hear my own stertorous breathing, my rattling chest and my gasping and wheezing, I still make good progress and rejoin the stream, now called the River Barrow, as I glide down into the port of New Ross. Here I find a fine bridge, a statue of an American president and a nineteenth century famine ship. I arrive in hope of getting some respite from the road, a glimpse into Irish history and some help in finding the best way to Wexford and Rosslare. One out of three will have to do.

Photo of Jerpoint Abbey Paddy’s Wagonhttp://paddys-wagon.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/kilkenny-inistioge.html

photos of John Martyn Mojo4music.com and bbc.co.uk

Photo of Thomastown trip advisor.co.uk

Day 172: Better Remembered

Tags

County Kilkenny, cycle helmets, cycle tour of ireland, River Nore, roadside memorials

A Journey Around the British Isles … Part 68

I’ve studied the maps as closely as I can. There is no direct route from Kilkenny to Wexford or Rosslare. I’ve got a two part L shaped journey. The first part promises much; a forty mile meander down the banks of the maturing River Nore. At the end I’ll find a town called New Ross and will have the choice of staying there or continuing on a big road due east to Wexford. I’m not looking forward to that section at all. I’m resigned to it; have calculated that, if I have to do it, I’d be advised to do it in the quieter, early afternoon traffic. It is the only dark cloud on my horizon and it niggles its doubt into my mind. If I could see into the future, I’d be able to see it turning into the best part of another fine day. It takes a considerable twist of fate and I find these happening more often since I became nicer.

Once I’m underway I find it to be one of those mornings when turning the wheels is hard work. There is no way of telling, until you have done a few miles, just what sort of response you are going to get out of your legs. What fuel you put into your body makes an increasing difference as you get older. Stuffing myself with fried bacon and eggs each morning does not help. It seems like a good idea. It isn’t. Chomping on an apple helps and it is with good bites that I leave Kilkenny city limits and head off on a road that I have mistaken kilometres for miles. A simple conversion knocks ten miles off my journey. This is more like it!

Thirty miles following a river to the sea must mean a long, gradual descent. It doesn’t. There is altogether too much uphill to make sense. Part of it is the early morning legs and the rest the road’s habit of going up and down the sides of the valley. I’ve been told it is a dangerous road. “There’s always someone being killed on that stretch. You be safe now.” Had been the parting words from the guest house. As a cyclist, there really isn’t much you can do. My lycra friends would say that you’ve got to be seen and justify their tendency to skin tight stretchy man made fabrics. The logic doesn’t follow. Green is the most difficult colour for drivers to pick out and is one of the most popular with pedallers. And I can’t see how having the name of a French supplier of loose boxes written on your back is going to lessen the impact of a front bumper. My Kilkenny hurling shirt allays this fear. Anyone who can’t see that is either blind or intent. Or a over zealous fan of the Waterford team.

Then there is the on going debate about wearing a helmet. I stay on the outside of that one. I know I probably should but don’t. The whole beauty of cycling to me is a lack of constriction and a feeling of freedom. The helmet interferes with that. I don’t particularly enjoy riding a bicycle while wearing a helmet. I might even give up the whole thing if I was obliged to wear one. Friends say that you’d be so much safer if you wore one. Somebody always recounts a dubious tale of a friend of a friend. I point out that I’d be a heck of a lot safer staying home on the sofa. I don’t like the danger but reduce it in other ways.

Riding a road like this one on a Sunday morning is a pretty good health insurance. Sundays are largely free from lorries wherever you go and Sunday mornings are almost completely free of dangerous road users. Speedsters are sleeping off the over indulgence they require on a Saturday night, bikers need an audience and no one races to get to church; even in Ireland where the priests still have a little more sway.

The dangers of the road are to be seen at every third bend, (and there are an awful lot of bends on this road). Ireland, like England has become a country of little shrines to victims of road traffic accidents. In England these are tawdry, sad looking affairs with a photograph flapping on a road sign surrounded by dead flowers in dirty cellophane and perhaps a rain soaked, sun faded teddy bear undermining the claim from family and friends never to forget.

In Ireland the shrines are altogether more professional, but none the less tasteless. I’m fully in favour of mourning the passing of loved ones, all the more so if young lives have been tragically foreshortened. I like fitting memorials and like to light a candle to celebrate lives lost. Church yards and churches have done this job splendidly for centuries. The last place to celebrate a life is the place where that life has been lost. I’m sure the victim wouldn’t want to be remembered for the last unfortunate mistake of an otherwise worthwhile existence. And I’m sure they wouldn’t want to have their final resting place marked with plastic bound flowers that rather resemble a tipping site than a family memorial. At least these dreadful tributes fade and are eventually swept away. Here on the R700 we have professionally made memorials. Here are crosses and headstones (surely the victims aren’t laid to rest here!) and virgins and in several cases of extreme bad taste, memorials shaped like the motorcycles that killed them. The victims are usually remembered by nicknames that further reduce any real sense of dignity that may otherwise have survived this gruesomeness. “In Loving Memory of ‘Diggsy’ Who Died Here Aged 26.”

I may be in a minority here but I dislike the practice. The crude, tasteless, showy, cheap memorials shout out just that. You died a terrible death before your time. We will now compound that crime of fate by remembering your good life in a flashy, tawdry memorial that looks not dissimilar, in its actual effect, to littering. It makes me feel very sad, and not at all in the appropriate way.

Day 171: Say Fifty for Cash

Tags

Bishop Berkeley, Green's Bridge, hurling, Johns Bridge, Kilkenny, Saint Canice Cathedral, The Black Abbey

A Journey Round the British Isles … Part 67

There are a dozen tables neatly laid. I’m the first to arrive in the dining room and I’m shown to the table for one. The room soon fills up and is groaning and straining with a Babel of accents and languages by the time I’ve breakfasted. I start with muesli and add the first banana I’ve eaten in over a week. My body scents healthy breakfast and sets up a little chorus of thanksgiving. My mind, though, has seen the words “Full Irish” on the chalk board and I simply haven’t the will power to resist it. When God or physics set the universe going they inserted an inevitability clause. I am no more guilty of weakness in choosing the big cooked breakfast than the apple was guilty of falling off Isaac Newton’s tree. There is an immutable law of cause and effect at work here. I see the words “Full Irish” and the words “Yes please” come out of my mouth. I could be speaking any one of the seven languages currently being used in the Kilkenny dining room. I have every idea of what I’m saying but absolutely no control over the saying of it.

The husband is playing the Maitre d’ and playing it with a full measure of bonhomie, even if a little of it seems to come from the drawer marked “forced” rather than the drawer marked “natural”.

The breakfast should be the last I have in ireland if the day goes to plan. The day does go to plan but the breakfast turns out to not even be the last one I have that day. Fortunately for my lethargic side, it isn’t as huge as some have been. The sausages are smaller, as are the black and the white puddings and there is no soda bread and not even a hint of a potato pancake.

The man is very keen on my shirt. I’m sitting radiating glory from the yellowest shirt I have ever worn. I think the fellow is trying to belittle me in some way. I am in Kilkenny and I am wearing the yellow and black of that county and have the crest emblazoned on my breast. It cost me five euros and my only regret is that I didn’t buy five more. He’s keen to point out that Kilkenny are playing Waterford in an important semi-final in a few days and that my route takes me through Waterford. “Those boys down there will be having something to say to you when you ride by with a cats’ shirt on yer back.”

I continue to enjoy my breakfast, down two rather good cups of coffee and am visited  at table by the stunning lady of the house whose offer to knock ten euros off my bill may or may not have something to do with me being served by an irritating fellow. i like to think it was because she knew a handsome fellow when she saw one. The truth is actually that she, like most small business people preferred fifty you can fold to 60 through a card reader. I wandered off to find a bank machine and to have a final look at this almost perfect little city.

Ireland is smaller than mainland Britain by quite a margin but it has longer and bigger rivers and lakes aplenty. The River Nore runs  north to south right through the city and on to New Ross where it joins the River Barrow before flowing out to sea. All the best cities make a feature of their rivers and Kilkenny is no exception. The guest house is situated by the Great Bridge of Kilkenny,  known for centuries as Green’s Bridge. The current structure has survived for 350 years and is a rather elegant multi arched bridge. It is the site of a number of bridges that have been somewhat less successful. The river has a strong current and is shifting a great deal of water, even in August. In time of heavy rain it can be a tremendous torrent. In 1763 the whole bridge collapsed and was washed away. Locals gathered around the next bridge downstream to watch the event. Unfortunately sixteen people thought the best place to see the bridge wash through was on John’s Bridge, some few hundred yards to the south. The effect of the flood and the masonry from the northern bridge washed away the southern bridge too. None of the sixteen people were ever seen again.

The castle is a magnificent sight today and has a long history. I only have time to skirt round. It is beautifully open to view. No high walls to obscure it, and open gardens to the rear. There are churches and cathedrals and abbeys to spare. The Black Abbey is actually grey. The name derives from its Dominican status. The Dominican’s were known as the black friars.

There’s a St Mary’s Cathedral, which is quite splendid and a Saint Canice Cathedral which is almost too good to be true. It is one of the oldest buildings in the city and indeed the one that gave the city its name. Kilkenny translates as the Church of Canice. The round tower is something I have never seen before. It is too narrow to hold a stairwell and can only be climbed internally by means of some very long, and rather steep, ladders. Its purpose seems to have been as a lookout. there is something haunting about the whole building and not entirely in a ghostly sense.

The city has always been a centre of brewing and though the main brewery was closed there is still beer made in the city. My friends who still partake of a drop or two are keen to point out what I missed in being an early to bed with a mug of cocoa sort of a fellow.

I locate the two buildings I have been in search of. A bank and a post office. At the bank I get prompt, efficient and altogether impersonal service from an ATM. In the post office I get my customary friendly welcome and altogether superior service.

By ten o’clock I’m on my way. Once round the castle and onto the road heading south. I take two attempts to make sure I’m on the right road. I might have been better going by river. The Nore has already been my guide for twenty miles. It is going to keep me company for another forty five. And that’s just the first part of today’s adventure.

Jonathan Swift and Bishop Berkeley were both educated in Kilkenny. I pedal off to explore countries as yet unknown to me wondering whether my bicycle is actually real or if it only exists in the mind of someone looking at it.