Ireland At A Cyclist’s Gentle Pace The Rural Routes Of Ireland, The Lifestyles And The Moods Are Captured By A Solo Bicyclist With No Set Mileage Goals And A Variable Itinerary

Cha chruinnionn cloch chasaidh caonach (A rolling stone gathers no moss, but it gets a great shine) - Irish proverb

The digital odometer on the handlebar has been a precise chronicler of this trip. It has duly recorded that in the past seven days, 208.7 miles have been ridden at an average speed of 9.3 miles per hour.

But the odometer has been a soulless chronicler. It has counted only the miles. It has not counted what really counts - the hills conquered, the landscapes viewed, the people met.

People such as teacher Aoine Devlin’s sixth-graders, who in Dublin gave me directions out of town that deserved an “A” for enthusiasm if only a “C” for accuracy. And young Stewart Carty, whom I helped to paint the gate of his parents’ pasture near Ballinasloe. And musician Nick Power of Galway, who showed me how he plays the bodhran, the goatskin drum of traditional Irish music.

That kind of intimacy is not possible while isolated in a rented car or a tour bus. But it’s standard equipment on a bicycle. Moreover, solo cycling has advantages over group cycling. It has let me set my own itinerary or no itinerary at all, and let me interact with the Irish people more than I would have in the too-cozy insulation of a tour group.

My goal was to cross Ireland, to get from Dublin on the Irish Sea to Galway on the Atlantic. In a small way, it was a yearning that all explorers - be it Columbus crossing the ocean blue or the proverbial chicken crossing the road - have had “to get to the other side.”

Ireland is an ideal country for a casual cyclist to cross. English is spoken, of course, cyclists are an accepted part of traffic, and Dublin and Galway are only 136 miles apart by major highway.

But major highways were to be avoided in favor of roads less traveled - tree-lined lanes, narrow farm roads, even canal towpaths.

I also wanted to avoid major hills. Even though I had rented a state-ofthe-art 21-speed mountain bike, I was also equipped with two middle-aged legs and two saddlebags stuffed with 25 pounds of clothing and camera equipment. So I chose a route that is mostly flat, although no pedal pushover.

That route, like most of Ireland, is also mostly rural. Signs announce “threshing festival and barn dance” and “ploughing championship”; bicycles share the road with tractors; clumps of horse manure on the road act as organic speed bumps.

But even on that rural route, there was no shortage of bed and breakfasts. And traveling during the off season (after August), reservations weren’t needed. B&Bs typically are tidy homes, their yards abloom with flowers, their rooms filled with knickknacks and collectibles.

Just as appealing, guests at B&Bs get to know the owner-occupants and learn about their interests. In Newbridge, there were Mary and Dermot O’Shea of Kerryhill B&B. Dermot showed me his greyhounds, which he trains and races.

In Tullamore there was Jim Clancy of Seandon B&B. Clancy collects bicycles. He invited me to get off my modern bike and try to ride its ancestor - his 1880 penny farthing, with its 48-inch front wheel and 10-inch rear wheel. My effort was woefully wobbly, my high hopes cut short by a low clothesline.

And in Loughrea, Joe Fahy of the Olde Mill B&B showed me the eels in his cellar. As they migrate down the adjacent stream to the sea to spawn, he diverts them into a cistern and sells them for consumption in Germany and France.

Typically, each day I rolled out after breakfast with no set mileage in mind, averaging 20 to 40 miles. In the evening I’d pick out a pub and treat myself to some Irish music and “pub grub.” That’s sandwiches, soups and, of course, Irish stew.

The first day got me as far as County Kildare, 40 miles southwest of Dublin. Kildare is thoroughbred country, its grass rich in bonebuilding calcium, its rolling plains dominated by The Curragh, 5,000 unfenced acres where racehorses are exercised each morning.

Horse racing has been a tradition on The Curragh for 2,000 years. Tradition is the mortar of Ireland, binding generation to generation like the stones in a wall.

Patsy Cummings is a lockkeeper on Ireland’s Grand Canal, as were her mother and her grandmother. I met her on the third day along the canal towpath west of Tullamore.

“This lock goes back to 1803,” she said outside her whitewashed cottage next to Lock 29. “My grandmother was a lockkeeper at this very lock. But I’m not as busy as she was. There were passenger boats on the canal then, drawn by horses along the towpath. There are only pleasure boats now.”

The Grand Canal, which flows from the Shannon River east to Dublin, meanders through green fields where sheep graze on spindly legs - woolsicles.

Ireland’s green is deep and abiding. It is the green of pool tables, Christmas ribbon and Kermit the frog. Where Ireland is not green, it is brown: the brown of the bogs. Bogs are vast soggy fields of peat. Following a road through the western edge of the Bog of Allen, I stopped to watch Ignatius Fletcher and his young son, Liam, as they transferred a wagonload of peat, in slab form, into their barn. While Fletcher paused to talk, leaning on his pitchfork, he watched with obvious affection as Liam tossed peat slabs through the barn door with varying degrees of accuracy.

“Peat bogs build up over centuries. That turf peat might be a thousand years old,” Fletcher said, pointing to slabs as dark and dense as chocolate. “Turf is cut in the bog by huge machines. When it is cut, it’s wet. It has to be dried.”

On the fifth day, I detoured to Clonmacnois, a monastery on a hill overlooking the Shannon River. Clonmacnois was founded by St. Ciaran in the year 548. Monks were cloistered there before Mohammed was born, before Buddhism was established in Japan, before Christianity came to England.

Walking in the sandalsteps of those ancient monks, among the ruins of their stone temples, their high crosses and their round towers, built to protect them from marauding Vikings, tweaked the imagination. When the sun peeked through the lace curtain of thin, tattered clouds, it seemed like a bright benediction; when a flock of geese sounded off in a nearby field, they seemed to be honking hosannahs.

A day later I reached Galway. Like most Irish towns, Galway is a jumble of pubs, bookmakers, off-license (liquor) shops, chemists, butchers, tobaccanists, news agents, victuallers (“fruit, vegetables, fish”) and more pubs.

Pubs are inviting sanctuaries, warm cocoons of wood and glass. Patrons duck in for a pint of Guinness or perhaps only a cup of camaraderie. Pubs are places of tradition, too. In Galway, Marty Rabbitt has spent 50 years behind the bar of the pub his grandfather opened in 1872, flush with nuggets he had dug from the California gold fields. Rabbitt is 73, born the year of Irish independence.

Galway was supposed to be journey’s end. But in one last detour I rode west to Rossaveal the next day, loaded the bike onto a ferry and sailed to Inishmore, the largest of the three Aran Islands in Galway Bay.

If, as Robert Frost wrote, “good fences make good neighbors,” then neighbors on the Aran Islands surely are the best. They have built stone fences for centuries, parceling their bleak, wind-whipped fields into eversmaller plots that stretch to the sea.

Mary O’Flaherty of Inishmore keeps another Aran Island tradition. She knits sweaters. “This knitting has been handed down from generation to generation - my mother and my grandmother,” she said.

Like them, she knits from patterns that exist only in her head. “No two sweaters are alike,” she said. “I can do a sweater in four days.”

She sells her sweaters, priced from $100, from her home. During the high season, her cottage is packed with tourists.

Inishmore is hilly, its main road rising and falling like a musical score. For a cyclist, it is a symphony for second gear. But the gods of topography are fair; every uphill is followed by a downhill.

And here on this far-flung fringe of Ireland (continuing west, the next landfall is Canada) the trip ends. And it ends without one flat tire or, more remarkably, one rain shower. As the Irish proverb says, a rolling stone gathers no moss, but in 208.7 miles it does gather a memory or two.

MEMO: This is a sidebar which appeared with story:

IF YOU GO Like most of Europe, Ireland is bicycle-friendly: Bikes can be transported on ferries, trains and buses. Although there are few dedicated bicycle paths, traffic is generally light outside major cities, and many roads have shoulders that allow cyclists to stay out of the flow of traffic. The route described, from Dublin to Galway and over to Inishmor, is fairly flat, and 25 miles or more a day is not difficult for a person of moderate fitness. Small towns in Ireland are generally free of crime, but do not leave valuables unattended in large cities such as Dublin. Unattended bikes should be locked to a lamp post or fence rail. A valid passport is required for travel to Ireland. The exchange rate is about one Irish pound to $1.60. The Irish Tourist Board (345 Park Ave., 17th Floor, New York, N.Y. 10154-0180; phone 212-418-0800) can provide a road map of Ireland (scale: one inch to 10 miles) and a cycling map that has 23 suggested routes varying from 90 to 202 miles. Ordnance Survey maps are even more detailed (a half-inch to one mile) and are available from bookstores in Ireland. Bike rental shops are usually located near bus and train depots. The Rent a Bike shop at 58 Lower Gardiner St., Dublin, (phone 011-353-1-872-5399; fax 011-353-1-836-4763) rents 21-speed mountain bikes for $44 a week. Pump, light, lock and flat repair kit are standard equipment. Optional equipment available for $6 a week each includes helmet, pannier bags, child seat and car rack. Bikes can be picked up at Rent a Bike in one city and dropped off in more than 20 other locations in Ireland. Bed and breakfasts are common in Ireland, even on lesser roads, and in the off-season (before or after July and August), cyclists can count on finding lodging without reservations. B&B rates are about $25 a night, including a traditional Irish breakfast. Some rooms are “en suite” - with private bathroom facilities. The tourist board also can provide a booklet on hotels, another on farmhouse accommodations and a third on guesthouses and B&Bs. U.S. companies that conduct a group cycling tour of Ireland (the Ring of Kerry) include Backroads, 1516 5th St., Suite L101, Berkeley, Calif. 94710; phone 800-GO-ACTIVE. Books on cycling in Ireland include “Bicycle Tours of Great Britain and Ireland,” by Gay and Kathlyn Hendricks (Plume Books), which outlines a six-day tour of the Ring of Kerry; and “Round Ireland in Low Gear” by Eric Newby. A good general guide for independent travel is Lonely Planet’s “Ireland.”

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Story and photographs by Mike Nichols Universal Press Syndicate