21 Black Head
0558, Friday, November 24, 2003
It’s so dark this morning that I can barely see three or five metres in front of me and I’m absoljootly hashtag brickinnit. The cars can hopefully make me out from my scutty emergency lights flashing off the arse of my bike but the torch sellotaped to my actual handlebars isn’t strong enough to illuminate much road and I can’t tell the difference between a filled pothole and an extant one so I’m all the time swivelling out. If I stumble on one I’m downzo and at the mercy of the passing traffic. I only see the full road whenever cars behind me push back the darkness with their big beams. But most cars are oncoming, blinding me as they head to probably work before Galway’s inexcusable traffic winds up for another day of lifewasting. Thankfully, the road surface is mostly good, here in South East Galway, on the N56 heading from Oranmore down to the bright lights of Kilcolgan.
21.0.1 Stakeholder management
I’m heading to see Black Head lighthouse in North Clare and soon I’ll be turning right for Kinvarra, before entering the barren Burren, whose northern coast I’ll be tracking all the way to the upjut of Black Head at one extremity of Galway Bay. It’s about a hundy k round trip, plus lunch and some time to listen to accents, so I thought I’d stall off at sunrise around 8ish and be back before dark at 4. But it turns out my #StakeholderManagement has been suboptimal and my wife was expecting me back for the 1pm check-out that I have, to be fair to me, negotiated with the Oranmore Lodge Hotel. So last night we went through the motions of working out a new plan. Me not being back for lunch was a red line. She’s still a L-driver and doesn’t fancy driving illegally through an unfamiliar city. Plus it’d be too much for her to take on public transport system with a teething infant and a bouncing six-year-old. Now lookit, lives will change forever once she passes her driving test, although she still hasn’t fully grasped its magnitude, for good or ill. Not only will she be able to head off wherever for the Doris, with or without the kids, she’ll also be able to drive out to lighthouses to rescue her craic-absorbing husband from the misery of cycling back. My mother always said the worst part of cycling was getting to the start and back. So let me tell you, getting home from lighthouses on a bicycle is a pain in the neverendingly Gordon and - and that’s a stressed ‘and’ - with the journey’s goal having been achieved, getting home is almost as deflating as cycling without the air in your tyres.
21.0.2 Lighting up time
The solution, it turns out, was for me to accidentally wake up stupidly early and cycle in the darkness, using whatever lights I could muster up. So I grab my unedited bits’n’bobs from the hotel room and head out to the car where my bike has been sleeping for the last two nights. The night porter wakes up as I head through reception and I ask him for some duct tape for my torch. He has none but his role of sellotape should do. I move the car under a street light and then start putting my bike back together. Before driving here on Wednesday, I left the bike upside down in the morning rain so I could soften up the filth it absorbed on Paíd Morrissey’s cattle farm, then I gave it a quick rinsearooney and loaded it in the boot of my MC Hammer. For some reason the back wheel fell off and, while that was handy for lobbing the bike in the boot, I now need a forking spanner to put it back on and for some reason I’ve not brung one. So I have to tighten the wheel with my fingers and then reconnect the chain. Afterwards, I give the unwashed drivetrain a once-over with WD40 and I’m hoping it’ll kinda clean itself over the course of the Caelan. It’s a little hack I learnt from the Worldwide School of Halfarsery. Lastly, I spray WD40 all over my filthy fingers to give them a wee wash, and then I do a lap of the car park to check the bike is working. It is, but I’d feel better if those nuts on the back wheel were fully secure. So while I’m dropping the car keys back to the hotel room, the night porter digs deep and fetches me an adjustable wrench, ledgebag that he is. I’m finally ready to Morocc’n’Ryle Nugent but before embarking, I ask him about the hack of the roads en route. The man is neither nosey nor a yapper but I have unlocked his specialist subject and he starts banging on about the entire 50k ahead of me. It’s information overload but I do at least find out that I have to swing a Human Right in Kilcolgan in order to stay on the N56. That’s all a cyclist cares about. Road numbers, turns, hills and traffic.
21.0.3 The bright lights of Kilcolgan
I turn left out of the Oranmore Lodge, away from the village, and then turn right at the roundabout. The road is lit for the first half k and it’s only then that I get the shock of the darkness. I can’t see a thing bar stars. The cars are in my eyes. The worry builds. I know I should go back but I can’t do that. I punch on for like seven clicks, dodging leaves and potholes and praying I am seen by every driver. Eventually come to a little village of Clarinbridge which has lights. I can feel my body immediately relax, like I’ve shifted from an apocalyptic movie back in to civilisation, and I’m reminded of how much effort goes in to making the world a safe place. But in truth the only danger comes from those man-killing tanks we all drive around.
It’s dark again until Kilcolgan, which is a drive-through village specialising in petrol stations. I don’t need another coffee yet but I could do with recharging my ¿emotional? batteries, even though I’ve only been cycling for 30 mins. The Circle K is a hive of AM activity and there’s a long-haired workman with hundreds of tools splayed all over the floor. I ask him for a shot of his duct tape and then I secure the wobbly torch in place. Afterwards, I grab a croissant and ask the coffee machine to make me an Americahnay, but I pull it out early cos I hate my tar watthery. There’s no seats inside so I have to drink my coffee outside in the cold. It’s not exactly Baltic City, Belarus, but an indoor perch would go a long way when it’s, youknowlike, ¿nine degrees?
I get yapping to the manager and he’s as kind as they come. He asks me how I am, leaving me the chance to tell him the octual onswer. Scared, I’m tell him. We talk roads, and the perils of tour buses, and wet leaves on bike lanes in Dublin. That triggers the doom and gloom. His mother is eighty-three years of age and says the Wisht of Ireland will be gan by 2050. She’s glad she lived her life when she did. A little more reassuring is that there’s a bike lane between Ballinderreen (two miles from here, he says) and Kinvarra (seven k, I reckon).
21.0.4 Darkness into light
The right turn to Kinvarra takes me to an even darker, much narrower road, and a frightening sign saying you can legally drive at a hundy clicks a Paddy. All the same, I’m half glad there’s no hard shoulder now because you can’t trust the sneaky bastids with their variable width and unkempt surfaces. I go in and out of Ballinderreen village with no sign of a bike lane and I’m aghast. Eventually it shows up and I expect to feel calm, seeing as I’m no longer in danger of death, and yet I’m just the same. My fear is simply of falling off the bike and that’s even more likely to happen on an unwashed bike lane. It turns out to be smooth enough bar the leaves and I start to trust it except for some needless barriers which I almost crash into. The bike lane then criss-crosses the main road, which is a complete hoss. Do bike-lane designers not understand that cycling is about rhythm, like dance music, and you just wanna put the needle on the record and dance to the sound of the underground. Kraftwerk grasped this connection on their Tour de France album, having already captured the Autobahn and the Trans-Europe Express. Movement is rhythm is meditation, and stopping breaks the spell. Imagine if DJs stopped their records, every so often, for like three or eleven seconds and bouncers checked your ID again, like passport controllers interrupting your sleep on an overnight train.
It’s still dark when I arrive in Kinvarra and, at 0718, according to my bank records, I grab a bottle of isotonic in the Eurospar. Outside, I savour the colour of the buildings nearby. In some parts of the Wisht, they’ve gotten the memo that painting your buildings fun colours takes píosa misery out of Ireland’s greyness. Kinvarra is one of those towns and I’m looking forward to seeing it in its splendour on the way back, as it’s shaping up to be a cracking morning. I passed through here back in 2014, cycling the inland route, northwards from Ennistymon, and on to Tuam later that day, as part of the Mizen-to-Malin trip I did with my mam. I’m expecting another hour of darkness before sunrise, as I punch yonwards, but it’s bright enough now to see the road ahead of me and I can just #chill and do what I happily love.
21.0.5 The Burren loonscape
Now that I’m not worried for my own safety, I start thinking about how people eke out a living here. Clues come from the signposts and, as I am welcomed to Co Clare, I am directed to several artisan ventures that no one presumably commissioned, bar those in need of subsistence after settling on this infertile landscape. Chocolate factories. Fine Art. Woollen mills. Later I see a sign for a perfumerie. You don’t see them in Blanch. These are the businesses successful enough to have signposts. Who knows what else goes on. Most people live in ugly inorganic suburbs because commissioned work is nearby but the lunatics here are doing the converse, setting up camp before worrying how they’ll make ends meet.
By 0755, radiance emerges from behind the mountains and the stark landscape starts to open up. We’re in The Burren now, and the coast is to my right, with low-lying fields vanishing into the mellow, ɔ-shaped Galway Bay. Little isthmi connect small islands to the land and an old castle tower sits on one, alongside a family of dazzling limewhite holiday homes, while yonder sits an old lookout tower. Further again is my destination, Black Head, a huge slab of a hill, maybe 10k from here by sight and 15k by bike, but no alluring lighthouse is visible around its convex bend. These islands might well be in the Frank Ocean long before 2050, maybe even before our 83-year-old friend kicks the Hyacinth.
To my left are those smooth-from-afar Burren hills, laid back like supine boobs on the beach, only with the texture of cracked hands, and I’m reminded of the video to Aphex Twin’s Windowlicker. As I proceed, the land quality degenerates so that even the fields by the coast are becoming grassless and replaced by row after row of thick slabs of rock and sod-all soil for plants to grow in. This is a Unesco Geopark, a limestone landscape known as karst, a formation that attracts more tourists than lifers. The legendary description of The Burren says that “[t]here isn’t a tree to hang a man, water to drown a man, nor soil to bury a man”. You could, if pressed, hang a cat from one of the wind-angled trees. Astonishingly, I find some sad donkeys munching on what few plants do grow here. No source of fresh water presents itself until I’m closer to the lighthouse when I find an old stone building, like a micro-chapel, with a tiny stream inside and a sign marked drinking water. It takes little imagination to reconstruct The Great Famine of the 1840s, and the occasional derelict buildings aid in the process.
I turn right in Ballyvaughan, and at long last I’m on the home straight now. Directamundo to the lighthouse, eight or nine k, and no more need to be sifting through Google Maps. Some nice light is emerging from a hill behind me and maybe I’ll catch its beauty on my way back. For now though, almost everything in this direction remains grey. The sea. The clouds. The land. The road. Some colour emerges outside a hotel declaring its new purpose of housing refugees, with a sign erected in the blue on yellow of the Ukrainian flag, itself a simple rotation of the Clare flag. The Ukrainian flag represents their blue skies above yella corn fields, and at this hour it’s not obvious how such vibrant colours snook into the Clare flag, which would be greyscaled if based on the landscape. Exceptions include the autumn-brown ferns that populate the scabby land, and the very occasional patch of bright moss brings green joy. Right on the coast are some lawns and grassy fields, fertilised with seaweed no doubt by County Clare’s answers to The Bull McCabe.
Standing on the road, at the entrance to his homestead, is a man wearing a Connacht Rugby gilet which is very Leinster Rugby of him. I say hello and he looks like he’s up for the chats so I stop and yap, before remembering to STFU and listen. It’s a bit of a frankly work on of mine. I can fill any gap with shite talk so I have to remember to stall the ball and let the other person take a moment if they need it. It turns out he’s waiting for a delivery of concrete to pave the garden and give the daughter a patch for cycling. There’s no way she’d be safe out here on the main road. He tells me about the marauding buses and points to a corner on the road where they get jammed up. If they meet there at just the wrong time, it can take fully half an hour to clear the build up of cars. He said he’s offered a bit of his land to the council so they can widen the road, but to no avail. The delivery lorry approaches and I stall on, wondering to myself how much land the nation’s farmers would be willing sacrifice as part of a safer journeys program.
The lighthouse itself is as disappointing as I expected, being just a wee light on top of a scaldy box. Some commissioned graffiti would liven it up and bring some colour to the bald hill. But the real disappointment arises from the convex shape of Black Head causing the land to curve away from the eye after a couple of hundred metres in either direction. There is none of the usual sense that the lighthouse marks the land’s endpoint and its position can only be appreciated from an aerial view. The situation feels like a miniature version of the entire planet, where you must content yourself with your local surroundings, and the bigger picture can only be seen from a satellite. A tiny locked gate marks the thin path to the lonesome building and a sign says no entry. Of course I step over the low wall and scuttle around in my bicycle shoes trying to find a good spot for a snap, but soon I have to be careful as the rock drops irregularly into the sea. I sit back down by the gate for a breakfast of pistachios and oranges, and try to admire the view of Connemara across the bay, but now I can feel the teeny wind in my cold body and there is no shelter. It’s like begging on the Ha’penny Bridge, so I just hit the Dermot and soak up the last of the sunrise on the way back.
I aim for a real breakfast in Ballyvaughan and, when I get there, I push straight on to Kinvarra to get the clicks under my belt, savouring the blue skies all the way. By 1030, Wild Beans cafe is hopping, with its Nordy owner setting the tone, so I guzzle a quality pair of Amaricani and scribble down some notes, while finally getting in a wee gawk at local latte drinkers, some of whom are tourists. The cycle home is a joy for once, with the wind on my back and the blue skies blazing. After Kinvarra, I see a sign saying “No splitting of farms for greenway”, and it seems that this is the faultline over which the battle will take place in the coming decades between farmers and those looking for safe cycling routes. A similar argument was made in the Save the Glen campaign twenty years ago, when the protesters, camping in the ancient woods, argued that the natural habitat of the animals would be ruined. I’m back in time for checkout at 1, and we all stall off to Salthill to check out the Atlantaquaria, a marine zoo. Outside, Black Head is visible across the bay, with its blackness highlighted by the setting sun.
