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travels in my own country

Tag Archives: Slieve Bloom Mountains

Day 164: Don’t Look Now!

12 Wednesday Feb 2014

Posted by simon682 in A Cyclist on the Celtic Fringe, Uncategorized

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Angel of the Mountains, Eagle of Toledo, Joe Gladwin, Last of The Summer Wine, Slieve Bloom Mountains, Wicklow Hills

A Cycle on the Celtic Fringe … Part 61

All good things must come to an end. Three of the happiest hours of solitary contentment. My sketching was in its early stages. The product was pretty awful but the process was empowering. I’ve always considered myself someone who notices a little more than my associates. While sketching you do nothing other than notice stuff you would have missed if you hadn’t picked up a pencil. I gradually realise why I have always been attracted to artists. Apart from the fact that art students tend to be rather attractive, the ones I know are all people who know stuff. People who notice stuff tend to be people who know stuff.

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I’m in the countryside, surrounded by mountains and farms. Upland sheep farms close by and dairy farms in the valleys and vales below. All run by farmers. You cannot be a farmer unless you notice stuff. At least you cannot be one for long. Farmers are another set of people I’ve always got on with. What they know, they really know. They’ve seen it. They’ve worked it our for themselves. They use their five wits to understand things. Far be it from me to denigrate book learning, but there is no substitute for experiencing things and being fully aware of what you are experiencing.

A few days spent increasing your ability to notice a little more can save you a fortune. Don’t go off to the Alps or the Urals or the Rockies or the Dolomites. Come to Ireland first. Spend an hour or two walking on the Slieve Bloom mountains. You won’t run short of things to amaze and delight you.

I’ll go back there soon. Ireland seemed a long way off when I began the trip. Now I’m aware that I am less than a day’s drive and ferry from my front door.

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I’ve been on the tops for a while. One or two cars and a handful of cyclists have passed. I’m a little away from the road and the picnic benches put up there for the five minute trade. (Four hours looking out of a coach window is fine but five minutes is quite enough of looking at the view). I’m reminded of my favourite scene from Last of the Summer Wine. I’ll re-phrase that. I’m reminded of the scene I liked from the aforementioned long running television programme. Wally Batty had brought his wife  Nora up to the tops around the Holme Valley on his motorbike and sidecar, and is ready to get off to do something better than be up here doing what trippers do. His wife admonishes him and tells him to “Look at t’view!” He looks around a thousand acres of finest Yorkshire countryside and expresses the thoughts of the townie; “Ah’ve looked at t’view.” He retorts as though it is something that is either been done or not done and once done it has been fully done. The episode must have been some time ago. Joe Gladwin, who played Wally died in 1987.

The last person I’d communicated with was an old fellow tending his lawns as the road started to point to the sky. He was struggling with a huge mower with a seat. There is a new sight in Ireland of rich men approaching an age of not quite being able to tend for themselves. The country has plenty of old fools on very big lawn mowers. There seems a sort of Sysyphean  punishment here. You struggle all your life to afford your dream house and spend your entire dotage cutting the grass.

I’ve come up the hill like a champion. Darker thoughts are banished as you climb big hills on a bicycle. I’ve forgotten all the mechanical problems and the dangerous roads and the even more dangerous drivers. Up here I am the Eagle of Toledo, The Angel of the Mountains. I’m the big peasant boy from Pamplona with lungs like oxygen cylinders measuring out the cadence with legs that are far too strong to be mine. And it’s beautiful. So very beautiful. Up past the herds of contented cows. All the cattle in Ireland look contented and healthy and well fed. The sweat flows off me. My last wearable top is drenched in it. Up through the trees. Beach and oak and later pines and fir. The smell of the wet woodland drying in the morning sun was intoxicating. It’s a five mile climb and it takes you pretty much to the very top.

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Now I’m getting ready for the five miles of descending that surely must be coming my way. There is nowhere higher. Everything must be downhill.

A fellow about my age reaches the summit and wants to chat. He’s never cycled the Slieve Blooms before and is as delighted as I am. He’s from Dublin and had simply never considered them before, and now he’s all for making them his main destination. He loves the Wicklow Hills and tells me I must find time for them before leaving Ireland. I’ve been reading Joseph O”Connor’s book about John Millington Synge and that had already made me want to go to Wicklow. Not this trip, but soon. We’re joined by a couple who are the most athletic of us all. I’m the only one not in the proper cycling togs. I’m also the fellow who has come the furthest. It is often the way. The two men look as ridiculous as any man ever looks in the particular combination of lycra and slogans and lurid colours. The woman is an exception. This woman would turn heads if she was in a St Helen’s reserve kit. From the front, with flashing smile and jersey fashionably unzipped, she is something of a distraction. We’re going the same way and she invites me to hang on (cycling term for using another cyclist’s slipstream.) She is aware of her attractions and is an outrageous flirt. It seems to distress her partner and she is very aware of this.

I follow them down the hill at a discreet distance. From behind she loses none of her feminine beauty.

Day 163: A Day in the Mountains

11 Tuesday Feb 2014

Posted by simon682 in A Cyclist on the Celtic Fringe, Uncategorized

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Tags

Aeoliian Harp, Birdsong, Bucket List, Kinnitty, Laoise, Massif Central, Slieve Bloom Mountains

A Cycle on the Celtic Fringe ….Part 60

Leaving Kinnitty the road continues upwards for miles. Not a single free pedal all the way to the top, but what rewards. Every type of slope from gentle patting out of the rhythm to get off and push. Every type of vegetation from rich meadows with abundance of wildflowers to deciduous woodland, to conifers, to wild open moorland to the glory of the mountain tops.

These are not the highest mountains on the islands. By many a measurement they wouldn’t count as mountains at all.  At their tallest that are a little over 1700 feet. But if we’re looking for superlatives they beat all but the Massif Central in France at mountain top trumps. They are the oldest mountains in Europe and share that honour with their more celebrated French cousins.

If you draw a straight line between Dublin and Galway and another between Donegal and Rosslare. Then take your pencil and draw a third  between Belfast and Cork you will find the lines crossing each other in the Slieve Bloom Mountains. They form a impressive natural barrier between Counties Offaly and Laoise (pronounced Lee-sha). Laoise is sometimes referred to as the forgotten county and Offaly isn’t on many tourist trails. You’d do well to find a place that is more the true unspoilt spirit of the country. This is another unexpected gem in this jewel box of a journey. No-one would put the Slieve Blooms on their Bucket list except people who have been there.

I had the same experience cycling up the west coast of Scotland some years ago. Once I’d crossed the Erskine Bridge it took me seven days to reach Durness and the north coast and everyday I thought I’d seen the best that a country could possibly offer only to find the next day could beat it to blazes.  Loch Lomond was everything I hoped; the busy main road balanced by the shuddering height of the mountains as you reached its northern tip. Rannoch Moor and Glencoe made mere memories of the largest loch and then Ben Nevis and the road from Fort William to Mallaig made me wonder if I’d been wasting my film the day before. The fourth day took me onto Skye and views of the Cuillins, before transporting me to the palm treed charm of Plockton. I was welcomed with a seat by the fire and a place on the pool team. I drank too much and swore I’d keep in touch. I planned to return but haven’t managed it yet.

The glacial wildness of Achnasheen, the gorges and waterfalls on the road to Loch Broom. The stunning sea lochs and childhood memories of Ullapool. Nothing could possibly beat all of that. And then I entered Sutherland. I had not seen true beauty til that day.

Since crossing the Shannon, Offaly had given me simple grace and true beauty. It had served me well, offered me a friendly hand and guided me and watered me and fed me of its abundance. Here I was entering Laoise and I was already in heaven.

It is hard to describe just how pleasurable riding up mountains is. It isn’t the physical effort. Riding on rollers isn’t in any way pleasurable, nor is pounding out miles on an exercise bike. But the physical exertion is part of it. It is the terrain, the matchless beauty that is a mountain landscape, the sense of going up, the facts of nature that change the vegetation every quarter hour as you ride out of one ecosystem, one environment and into another.

You’re never far from the sound of water on the road from Kinnitty to the top. Wonderful forests embroider the hills and folds. Nearby they are trees and everything that makes trees wonderful; in the distance they are textures, patterns, folds and shapes and a thousand shades of green and a chiaroscuro of light and shade.

Discretion is the better part of Simon this morning. After shattering myself, back on day one, by refusing to get off and push, I take every opportunity today. I figure there cannot be a deal of pollution up here and make tea with water straight from a stream. At the time I didn’t quite have the nerve to drink it without boiling it. With hindsight I think this is my mother warning the five year old me against infection. The tea tasted great and a good guzzle of mountain water should have been slugged.

My West of Scotland trip was nearly brought to a close by being knocked off the road on Skye by a big black coach from Surrey. Remarkably I’m forced into the trees by another bus, same colour, same county. Do they have driving tests down there in the affluent south? Or have I offended their coach drivers in another life? I certainly offend this one, but I’m not sure he heard as he belches diesel fumes down  my throat and disappears over the next brow.

The next brow always seems like the summit until you get close and discover that it is merely the top of the foothills.

These mountains are a real leg spin, and eyeful of pleasure. I’m having a better day with my chest and once in the greenwood I’m almost ready to sing. I’m only stopped by the fact that the quiet music of the mountain itself is unsurpassable. Birdsong that echoes between the boughs, the constant companionship of falling water, and the Aeolian harp of the air moving in the forest.

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As broadleaf changes to conifer so does the range and pitch of the chords. Thrush and blackbird change to crow and the water now is softer, peatier and flowing not falling.

The hardest climbing is in the middle sections where there are some hairpins of sorts. Once above the tree-line I sit up and pedal and breathe and I would never tire of breathing this air and never tire of the unexpected beauty of these highlands. I’m only topping 1500 feet. Even by the standards of the British Isles that isn’t high, but there is nothing lacking in this mountain landscape. Granted there are no towering crags or huge cascades of scree or pillars of rock or thousand foot sheer cliff-faces. They wouldn’t suit. This is beauty truly blent. This is very heaven.

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From up here on a clear day, it is reckoned, you can see half of the thirty two counties. Discounting the Surrey Charabanc, I don’t see thirty two people all the time I am up there. I just pedal to the top. Stop, find a place to picnic and brew more tea. I see no reason to be anywhere else. I have my sketch pad, I have volumes of Yeats and MacNeice. I have some oatcake biscuits, some apples and half a pound of Irish Cheddar. I’m sure I could find berries if I went foraging. I’m short of nothing I’ve got. I’m on top of the oldest mountains in Europe and in tune with the spirits of those mountains. I sketch the outlines and read verses and eat my simple lunch. I don’t have a bucket list but if I had one it would be to feel the way I felt as I sat in springy grass on top of the Slieve Bloom Mountains.

Day 162: Writing Home

10 Monday Feb 2014

Posted by simon682 in A Cyclist on the Celtic Fringe, Uncategorized

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Tags

cycling in Ireland, Irish Post Office, Kinnitty, L'Alpe d"Huez, Slieve Bloom Mountains

A Cycle on the Celtic Fringe … Part 59

My last act in every town I stay in is to visit the post office. For the benefit of my English readers, it is like going to the post office used to be. If there are seven windows, then there will be seven windows open and seven helpful and friendly people waiting to sort you out with your pension, your water bill or even to sell the gormless twit in the baggy shorts an envelope, a stamp and some kindness. I always tell them that it is for England and that there are quite a lot of sheets. They are always able to give me the impression that they care.

I have impressed myself in several ways on this trip. One is not giving up when things were going against me and another is the number of places I’ve got to know that are off the usual tourist route. (I had intended to be much more adventurous but have had to rein back. My illness is now ever present and this means getting home quickly and it means hotels. Hotels eat into my budget. I had given myself up to a month to explore; I’ve had to take at least a week off that.) The main thing that has impressed me has been my diligence as a notetaker.

I haven’t yet got to the stage where I sit and write any reflections and observations as I have them, but I have got up at five every morning and written for between two and four hours. Each wad of notes is written on flimsy lightweight paper, folded into an envelope and sent home. Some people send their loved one poems and billet-doux of tenderness and love. I let her know the road numbers, the hills, the biscuits, the punctures, the bruised knees and the escapades of a middle aged cyclist on the slow roads of Erin.

The Irish postal worker always finds time for me. They carefully stamp up an nice envelope with an airmail sticker and a stamp with a squirrel or a frog and charge me 28cents. It seems ridiculously cheap and I worry about them being surcharged back home. Sometimes they help me with the spellings of places I have been told about but not seen written down, and I ‘m sure they’d deliver some potted shrimps to my aunt on Walney, if I asked them.

Post Offices serve a public service and should not be seen in purely profit making terms. The smile and the kindness are a social service, a health service and a simple and decent thing that comes with every visit to an Irish Post Office. They are at the heart of community, they hold communities together and provide a focal point for local events. They are a meeting place and a centre of communication. They are a very civilising thing and England is currently losing a layer of its best social structure by closing so many and selling the rest off to chancers.

This isn’t a political blog. I make no attempt to hide the fact that I care about social justice, hate greed and love people who care for others. I don’t hide it, but equally, I don’t preach it. I do recommend a visit to an Irish post office though. Do so, and you’ll realise what a bad mistake we have made on the more grasping side of the Irish Sea.

The road is flat and damp from an overnight shower. The Slieve Bloom Mountains get slowly closer. My map doesn’t have contour lines on and the  mountains don’t look huge either on paper nor on the horizon. Looks can be deceptive. Let’s face it. They are called mountains. It’s not a word that is easily given away. In Holland it’s a word they only use on L’Alpe D’Huez day on the Tour de France. It’s a little before ten o’clock and I’m on my way to a place called Kinnitty.

On the way out of Birr I pass a cluster of guest houses (an accommodation of guest houses?) and soon find myself out in the countryside. Perhaps I could save a pound or two if I stayed in places like these. I weigh up the benefits. It’s the sort of thing you do as you warm up to pedalling. I like the relative anonymity of a larger hotel. I like the bath tubs and the double beds. I like the central location and the history of places like Dooly’s. I like what believers call ‘the communion of saints’ you get in a place where travellers  have stayed for hundreds of years. I’m also dubious about small hoteliers. I have no idea about Ireland. My only experience is a kindly old lady who took me in, charged me at 1975 prices and let me use the family bathroom; while her daughter’s family played poltergeist with me and buckled the back wheel of my bike. In England, if you want to meet a slightly mad person who gives you the creeps, then small hotels are a good place to start looking. Most small hoteliers of my experience seem to have the unusual characteristics (for people in the hotel trade) of not liking people and feeling resentful that anyone should be in their house. Granted my experiences don’t add up to a scientific survey, but they have made me a devoted user of places where you get looked after by people who have actually trained.

The first ten miles are always a special time of the day. Roads in the middle of the morning are quiet and drivers are in a passive mood. Today it is flat all the way with rich pasture on both sides of the road changing suddenly to bog and then back to meadowland again. Every so often a village with delightful older houses and unimaginative new developments. The double garage mini mansion is also in evidence. Here, each one has a summer house or shed where you might quietly entertain a couple of dozen dancing couples. The certainty is that there will be a trampoline in the garden. It’s invariably neglected and almost always on a slope. I think the two facts may be connected.

After ten miles I reach Kinnitty and it doesn’t disappoint. I sit with an ice cream and look towards the Slieve Bloom Mountains and watch the quiet village life pass by. There are houses a plenty, shops and a pub. There are also a couple of buildings that look like they may have been pubs until quite recently. It would take some fine drinkers to support three bars in a village this size. If you delve in deeper you’ll find a castle and a genuine pyramid. None of your Louvre and Centre Parcs sort of pyramid; it’s the real thing.

The castle is currently a hotel but is on the market if you’ve got £16million to spare. It’s got quite a big garden.

The road beyond the village heads upwards. I’m looking forward to a day in the mountains, but I’m in no rush.

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Categories

  • A Cyclist on the Celtic Fringe
  • A Jaunt into The West Country
  • A Journey into Scotland
  • A-Z of England 2014
  • Day Tripping
  • Mostly Concerning Food
  • Music and Theatre
  • Pictures and Poems
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Aberystwyth Alan Ladd Aldi asparagus Ballinasloe Barrow in Furness Betty's Bicycle bicycle tour Bill Bryson Birr Bonnie Prince Charlie Caithness Cardigan Carlisle Charles Lapworth Chesterfield Chris Bonnington claire trevor Cumberland Sausage Cumbria Cycle tour of England cycle tour of ireland Cycle tour of Scotland Cycle tour of Wales Cycling Derbyshire Dumfries Eli Wallach England Glencoe Halfords Ireland James Coburn James Hutton james stewart John Ford john wayne kedgeree Kilkenny Kris Kristofferson Lake District lidl Mark Wallington National Cycle Network New Ross Newtown Newtownstewart Northern Ireland Offaly Oscar Wilde pancakes Risotto Robert Burns Roscommon Scotland Scrambled eggs Shakespeare Shrewsbury Slieve Bloom Mountains Sligo Sperrin Mountains Staffordshire stagecoach Sutherland tagliatelle The Magnificent Seven Thomas Hardy Thurso ulverston vegetarian Waitrose Wales Wexford Yorkshire

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