Week 1: Ireland - 4th May 2012

Stage One: Training ride in County Galway

On unpacking my old Cannondale at Dublin Airport I had been astonished, and not a little annoyed, to find the front tyre punctured. Unless it were the pressure in the hold (in which case why hadn’t the back tyre blown too) how could this have happened? It was like a magician’s trick in bad taste because only a few hours earlier I had watched the man at Geneva Airport lift the bike, and then separately, the front wheel , carefully into the expensive cardboard carton and seal it firmly with official airport tape. “Ladies and Gentlemen, now you see the tyre in perfect condition. And now….…..you see it….…punctured!  A mystery, the more irritating because to cut down on weight on the Irish part of the journey I had seen fit, very foolishly, to dispense with both repair kit and pump. Luckily, I’d had the foresight to pack a spare inner tube.  With the invaluable assistance of my brother Stephen’s affable neighbour Vincent, who just happened to possess one of those high pressure pumps you find in garages, presumably to inflate the tyres of his tractors, it wasn’t long before this minor problem was fixed.

Now we were set for a short training ride, Stephen on his newly purchased, and aptly- named Giant, me on my smaller, battered , much older but well-loved Cannondale . We were headed for Clonfert Cathedral  and Shannonbridge.  From Lawrencetown we followed the Banagher road for 7 kms before turning left towards the small, tidy community of Clonfert.  At the bottom of the village, where the road makes a sharp right-angled turn, nestles the Cathedral next to its cross-shaped Yew Walk and a delightful piece of mixed woodland.  Hardly a cathedral in size but seemingly a cathedral in significance. The 12^th century west doorway is magnificent, extravagantly decorated and apparently unique and an appropriate entrance to this architectural gem, utterly hidden in the Irish countryside.

Past the ominous sign,” cul de sac”, the road deteriorated badly, tufts of grass became a continuous strip growing in the centre, the road surface a threat to my new “slicks”. We crossed over the  old Grand Canal (at this point, unfortunately filled in) and a few hundred metres further on the road, such as it was, petered out at the Bord na Mona  bog railway line, along which we pushed our bicycles for fear of more punctures and across the bridge with expansive views over the River Shannon, through the works themselves, overshadowed by the state of the (Norwegian) art peat-powered power station (a contradiction, perhaps) past the anglers taking advantage of the fish basking in the warm water escaping from the cooling system, to the main road into Shannonbridge itself.

We stopped to take a photograph of me and the bike in front of the low-slung seventeen-arched bridge before crossing to inspect the fortifications, constructed by the British in the very early 1800’s when Napoleon was threatening to attack by the back door.  Stephen was very nearly run over – virtually outside the police station - on our return to the village by two young blades in a big car, not untypical, I am finding, of the dangerously high speeds of many drivers on these narrow, hedged roads.  We retired to J.J.Killeen’s bar on the main street,  its one room festooned with hundreds of visiting cards, greetings in a myriad of languages, quirky aphorisms, random photographs and some interesting paintings. Quite well patronised by sombre locals fresh from a funeral, workmen at lunch downing pints of Guinness, and a couple of well-off Shannon boating parties seated at the tables,  Killeen’s  was certainly a friendly place,  what one always hopes to find in Ireland but which is, unfortunately, at least in my limited experience, becoming rarer to find. 

           

An excellent short training run in clear, fresh weather. We raced back home with a friendly tail wind.