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travels in my own country

~ idle thoughts

travels in my own country

Tag Archives: Wexford

Day 180: The Last of Ireland

28 Friday Feb 2014

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

≈ 5 Comments

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.

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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.

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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:

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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 178: Fellow Traveller

26 Wednesday Feb 2014

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

≈ 5 Comments

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.

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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.

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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!

25 Tuesday Feb 2014

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

≈ 4 Comments

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.

Dunbrody Famine Ship and Jerpoint Abbey Day Trip, 2011 011

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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“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.”

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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.

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Scotland 1987

Burns' Memorial
Burns’ Memorial
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Erskine Bridge
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Categories

  • A Cyclist on the Celtic Fringe
  • A Jaunt into The West Country
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  • A-Z of England 2014
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  • 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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