18 Tuskar Rock & Duncannon
0600, 12 June, 2024
The thought of cycling to a few score more lighthouses on the other side of the island has been overwhelming me, so yesterday I did a wordcount and I was just there looking at it, going, I can make a standalone book out of this. To the lighthouse, part 1: The mild non-Atlantic way. What remains is a manageable quantity of cycling, writing and mapmaking, which I can possibly dunzo this month before school’s out and it’s time for a summer skedj with the sprogs. Then I can worry Pat Rafterwards about the Wild Atlantic Doris and all those pesky islands and Northern dauntingly Ireland, maybe lash out a volume apiece for each of them. The idea only crystallized yesterday, so I had a look at the Freddy Forecast and decided to hit the Dermot today because the sun will be shining in the Sunny South East and there’s blanket rain forecast for tomorra.
18.1 Route
I’ve got a long summer’s day of it planned, picking up some outstanding lighthouses I’ve missed around the Wexford Coast. Lighthouse Pete noted that I missed the Duncannon lighthouses when me and Gk zipped past on our way to Hook Head. I also never saw Tuskar Rock from Rosslare Harbour when I was there so I’m gonna go and hunt for it. But this is really an excuse to check out the south-east Wexford coastline which I’ve skipped over. I also want to know whether it has as good a case as the Copper Coast of Waterford for being included in the Wild Atlantic Way. I’ve 120 clicks lined up which could be 140 with tangents on top, and that’s as much as I’ve ever cycled in a day, almost the magical 100 miles aka 160.93km, a figure that’s in my head on account of the athletics that’s on at the moment. Sharlene and Rhasidat running for more medals tonight in the Euros.
Packing up last night took donkeys, between fixing punctures and a whole bunch of positive procrastination tasks like doing laundry and sorting out the guest bedroom for possibly Airbnbers, an admittedly intrusive set up that might save me from the horror of working for the man. I’m just off the back of an unrepeatable month of Metro-Boulot-Dodo up in Dzublin. Never again. Four to five hours of a round trip on public transport every day. Last night I didn’t hit the hashtag til nearly midnight but I thankfully I slept until 6am and now I’m in the Boola Bogger by 7. It’s only like 65 Google minutes to Wexford plus curiosity time so I’ll be ready to rumble by half eight. I’d’a taken a Ballinaboola train to Wexford or Rosslare but there’s none til a quarter to frikkin eleven so that’d be half the day out the winda.
18.2 The lightbulb of shame
I decide to spend the drive nursing the poor little boy inside me who had to fend for himself in boarding school. My son is seven now, one year younger than I was when I was sent off, so I’m really starting to understand what I must have been like. I can’t imagine the horror my family must have had when I turned from impossibly garrulous to stone-cold silent. Don’t be a sneak. Never tell on anyone. I’ve been listening to some lectures about shame and I’m both apalled and delighted to find out how much shame and negative opinion I have of myself. I’ve only been looking into it for a fortnight now but the changes feel seismic. Suddenly I can suddenly see so much what I do wrong. And doubly so as a parent, channelling the horror through the generations. I try to put myself back there by listening to Automatic for the People. Suddenly, I’m back listening to Atlantic 252 in the car with my mam on the way home from school every Saturday afternoon. Drive. Try not to breathe. Everybody Hurts. A few weeks back, I was set off, in the juicer no less, by Man on the Moon, but I don’t even get that far into the album before it’s all too much. Afterwards, I start listening to Tim Fletcher’ – the same dude’s – lectures about about complex trauma. I don’t get any further than the essential characteristic of complex trauma is an inability to relax, and then I lash it off knowing there’ll be plenty to investigate later. This stuff is too heavy to do in large chunks.
18.3 Wexford
I approach Wexford from the Ferrybank side and have a gawk across the river at the lovely town slash future city whose atmos I’m fond of. Over the bridge, there’s all day parking for a Lady Godiva but, instead of stumping up, I push on and piss away 45 minutes looking for free parking and worrying about having an easier arrival this evening when I’m smashed. Old habits, eh. I eventually park up in a Tesco Extra then mosey in to the town to take some videos along the quays and I’m thinking it’d be nice to head out to that far-off, stickyuppy bit at the southern end of the bay. I go for a needless coffee and a necessary Barry in Cappuccino’s Cafe on Main Street. A Dublin lady serves me and points me up to the Union. I hate doing my business in public because toilet paper is really just a substance for drying your Gordon after you’ve washed it, not a cleaning implement in its own right. Using it is like claiming you’ve mopped the kitchen floor after wiping it with a dry J-cloth.
I stall it back outside to watch the world and lash down a few notes before pottering across the road for a snap of St Iberius’s church, outside which I try to rest my Paul van agin a wobbly bollard. A shabby, shamanic figure, bearded and built like a veteran tighthead, winks at me and suggests I don’t park it there. I explain I’m about to take a photo and he offers to take one of me, the bike, and the church. He proffers some lowkey bigotry, wondering why I’m taking a photo of a Protestant Church. I tell him it all happened, whatever that means, and he asks me if I’m from Dun Laoghaire. I tell him I’m actually from fockin Lucan and he suggests I keep that to myself, with my hundred thousand euro accent, a figure that is not far wrong, once you convert from old money. Being racked with shame about my #priviliged upbringing, I set about needlessly explaining myself, an onerous, humourless bit of bait I frequently take. Next time I’m just going to say that my aulwan was a lowkey snob who sent me to “a well-known North Kildare pratt factory that turns rich boggers into D4 dickheads”, as The Slate magazine so brutally put it back in the Daniel. After that my accent was mostly formed via Trinners for winners or, in reality, boozers for losers.
It turns out your man is a bit of a machine whisperer and also fancies himself as a salesman. He’s got a forty-year-old Viking I might like (the bicycle manufacturer, not the Norse invader). He wants someone who won’t mess with the aesthetic. I’ve already got a thirty-year old Viking at home, the infamous Blue Thunder, and now I wonder if Paul McQuaid dubbed it that because of the brand name. But the last thing I need is another vintage bike. It’s time I treated myself to a nice new bike, so I pass on yer man’s offer. He is also telling me about how the handlebars are too far forward on my bike. Too much pressure is on my shoulders not my lower back. He suggests I take the load off by arching my back a wee bit as I cycle. This explains the pains in my shoulders and why descending is so painful on this bike. Then he spots that the bearings on my back wheel are banjoed and he tells me to call him later if I need help. He also sends me the phone number for Ken the Bikeman who’s not a wallet-emptyer. He says his name is James and I suggest we catch up for a Brit Award once I’m back in town at like eight this evening.
18.4 Rosslare Strand
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I’m anxious to bounce pronto, and Ken the Bikeman doesn’t open for another half an hour, so I just hit the proverbial and head out on the N25. Getting to Rosslare Strand involves a little looparooney round the South Sloblands, a reclaimed estuary with no road bridge, although it can be seen from Ireland’s slowest train. A slob, it turns out, is not just a ‘slovenly person’. It comes from the Irish word slab, meaning ‘muddy land’, and the metaphorical meaning came later.1 There used to be an island there, home to Ibar of Beggerin, the above mentioned St Iberius, one of Ireland’s four early bishops, whose evangelism here pre-dated St Patrick’s. The two lads spent a bit of seemingly time together near Cannes, on the Lérins Islands, and St Ivor, as he is also known, was sent to set up a monastery in Ireland, putting in some spadework before Pat the Snaker came and finished off the job.2
I fork off at a roundabout for Rosslare Strand, and after a chunka nothing, arrive at a crucificial crossroads. A village sits to the left, an exit strat to the right, and the beach is just 100 yards in front. I head straight there and admire the view upstrand towards the East Wexford Coast and downstrand to Rosslare Harbour where the little harbour lighthouse marks the outmost point. The beach is clean and long and sandy but littered with fist-sized rocks near the entrance point, and ugly groynes are evenly spaced along the shore. Palm trees and beach entrances remind me of Cranfield Point up North and an earlier generation of second-homers retreating to the coast. A noticeboard map outlines the 16k loop around the strand although it turns out the strand used to be much longer before man’s intervention began to impact the beach system, first with the Sloblands and latterly with Rosslare Harbour.3
There’s an aulpair resting on a bench so I sit down nearby and start munching on my biscuits and cheese. I open with weather chat and it turns out the couple have driven down from Arklow today. I mention my beloved Hanging Rock beach but the husband tells me the cove is a better swimming spot as the water is safer and more level. But they lament the loss of the North Beach which was washed away by Hurricane Charlie back in ’86, and suddenly I can remember me and my littlest big sister Maggs, petrified, staring out the window. That hurricane was the scariest thing I remember from those halycon early years before boarding school. That and AIDS, which I was led to believe could be acquired simply by eating a solitary strand of human hair.
The husband talks about the proud history of Arklow industry. Munitions factories in the ‘20s and locals moving to South Africa after it shut. Hotels by the North Beach. Shipbuilding. It’s a pleasing contrast to what folk my age have told me about the town, such as: ’my da always said Arklow’s a dead end and will never come to anything’. Yer man tells me “I’m a shipwright”, as though he was heading back to the job after this little break, even though I reckon he’s been retired for fifteen years as his last job involved town planning at the tail end of the Tiger. So he tells me about laying the ship’s oak on an even keel and the Jim the Supervisor coming to make sure the work was in order, so afterwards he’d have to reset the wood to where he actually wanted it to be. Angela, the wife, is laughing now, as if she’s never heard the story in their fifty-odd years of marriage. I tell them nothing has changed. But I’m actually looking at them there and thinking, munters keeping other munters happy. A painful way to live.
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I grab a UPF-laden isotonic in the Centra and make my way up the village where local cash has interfaced nicely with the SuperVolu TidyTowns people. Floral decorations complement the nicely painted cafes and restaurants, unlike the usual attempt to put make-up on a pig. Kelly’s Resort Hotel has that 1960s Med vibe, with palm trees and a sculpted fir tree behind. Beyond it is a very well kitted out community centre, and I feellike all villages of a certain size ought to have the following: “a wide range of onsite facilities including a Playground, 18 hole Crazy Golf course, 3 Tennis Courts, Bowls, Running Track, Basketball, All Weather Pitch, Football Pitch, Indoor hall, and spaces for a variety of fitness classes [ , ] all new Padel Tennis courts [ and ] venues for meetings and training events’.4
Beyond the village, the inner side of the long sand spit has a buncha nice one-off holiday homes, some with an extra mobile home for the possibly grownupchildren, a category in dire need of its own word. The road ends at a tiny entrance to the Wexford side of the expansive bay slash pretty much lake. The water is calm and Caribbean clear and I’m delighted to see this side of the bay. It reminds me of the Mar Menor inside La Manga in Spain and I’m wondering if we’ll get out that way this year. I miss the heat. A wee boat chillaxes in the shallow sea. I say hello to a few downandbackers out walking and on my way back I stop to look at a beautiful stone monument of the lifeboat that was used in 1914 to rescue a wodge of Dano-Norwegian sailers clinging to Tuskar Rock. Two ladies come, one a regular explaining the story to her clearly visiting friend. The regular is a classic of the genre, getting the most out of the #SummerSeason. Tank top, shades, no-nonsense short grey hair. Long walks in the morning. Vino of a presumably evening.
I ask her about viewing Tuskar Rock and she tells me I can see it from the playground in Rosslare Harbour. But she also asks if I’ve seen the replica on the roundabout on my way here. It’s a bit of a detour but I can’t miss it, she says. It turns out that I have already missed it because it was on the roundabout where I turned off the N25. The whole point about roundabout art is that you have a big fukawf structure, unmissable even in a motorcar, like an American billboard, but this squat little laddie is blocked by simple signposts at eye level. I mount the roundabout and inspect the replica structure, imagine the intensity of living here with just my wife and kids. Or my parents and siblings. Mind you, that’d be a lot better than clinging to the rock on my Marcel Dobler. Although in the 1881 census, sixteen poor souls were glued to the rock. Enough for a game of eight-a-side table rugby.5
18.5 Rosslare Harbour
I get back on the N25 for Rosslare Harbour and follow your wan’s directions. Turn right at the church then head to the playground in St Brendan’s Council Estate, she was sure to point out, as if the name didn’t give away the dirty secret. From there I’ll be able to see Tuskar Rock. But after the church I spot a nine-month long protest so I stop to see what the Jacques Chirac is. There’s purple and yella signs all over the gaff and a retired couple sit outside a little house. It turns out a nursing home was planned but it’s being gazumped by an International Protection Accommodation Centre. They couple said there’ll be hundreds of men hanging around the town with nothing to do and they tell me about an eighty-seven year old local who has to get lifts into Wexford Town to see his wife instead of just walking down here on his rollator. Whatever about using hotels to house people in need, I venture, it hardly makes sense to oust the elderly and infirm in favour of other people in need. They tell me the jobs are all gone from the town and, while their kids had the choice of staying in the town to work, mostly in tourism jobs, the grandkids have no option but to leave. It seems a shame to have no hotels for people coming off the Lee Scratch Perry. It’s hard to see why this village is not booming, with a deepwater port connecting us to the continent, and none of your #landbridge nonsense with the belligerent Brexiteers in between. A few minutes later another fella is telling me how many more ferries are coming in this way thanks to Brexit, and I wonder if that self-aggrandizing movement would have succeeded if it’s name had been UKoff.
18.6 Tuskar Rock
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I get to the playground which sits on a cliff overlooking the harbour and long thin beach below. A roughish gravel path follows the cliff so I follow it and can soon see Tuskar Rock in the distance. A fella tells me I can walk the field out to Greenore Point – the farmer doesn’t mind – but no matter how far you go, the lighthouse doesn’t get any nearer. What a champ. I head out for a bit but the diminishing returns send me back. It’s after 1 now so I perch up on a bench and watch the harbour below in action while dunzoing the last of my scran. A ferry cruises up and reverses into its berth. Nearby a team of high-viz workers continue to expand the roads and prep the port for all this extra business. Between the skinny beach and the cliff a grid of walking paths has been mown into the long grass slash mini sand dunes. The weather is delicioso but it’s time to Morocc’n’Ryle Nugent. I had wanted to stall out to the very south-eastern tip of Ireland, Carnsore Point, but it’s a 25k doublebackarooney job because there is no obvious cycle path across the long beach at the base of Lady’s Island Lake. Not on Google maps. Not on Strava’s heat map, and not on the local noticeboard which advertise the walking routes along the South Wexford Coast, with its neverending beaches, known locally as burrows. Perhaps I could get through with the right bike and a team of huskies. Or one of those Fat Bikes I’ve been looking at since my epic failure on The Murrough.
18.7 Lady’s Island
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It’s proper rural between Rosslare and Lady’s Island and it’s good to be cycling because my brain needs a break. There’s not much en route bar spuds for sale and a couple of tourist routes. The Norman Way leads to various ruins on the south Wexford Coast, including Hook Head Lighthouse, and I hope to catch a few other spots later, while Eurovelo 1 Route is part of a gigantor cycle route that follows the Atlantic Coast of Western Europe from Portugal to Norway. It is the lowkey cycling version of the Wild Atlantic Way, except it includes miserly ol’ Wexford, Waterford and East Cork, if only because you need to be able to get the ferry from Rosslare to Wales to keep the bike on the road.
Lady’s Island village is dominated by a tall skinny nineteenth-century church on the land side and the protected ruins of a castle sit on the erstwhile island alongside various religious icons. A large shrine to Our Lady. The Stations of the Cross are rendered in mosaic and the varying degrees of competence results from the fact that it was a collaborative, community project. noticeboard shows an artistic rendering of miserable-looking pilgrims on their knees in the water and I bet the lads in Mecca will be having better craic on Friday for Hajj. Lady’s Island Lake explains a lot about the geography of South Wexford. There used to be a bay and an island but the bay got clogged up by a burrow, the name given here to the very long beaches that have taken over the coastline, while the island itself is now a peninsula, having been reattached to the mainland by further deposition. The landscape feels sad and long past its peak, from a human point of view at least, as I’m sure the birds in the vicinity are delighted with this outcome. I feellike this feeling can be generalised to the entire coastline of Wexford, a right-angle of irrelevance with life, or perhaps just commerce, passing by along the diagonal running from Gorey to Enniscorthy, New Ross and Waterford. The area is perhaps a smooth, east-coast foil for Ireland’s jagged west-coast peninsulae. Ideal for holidaymakers but lacking inner momentum for locals, and this seems like a poor outcome for the corner of the island closest to the continent. Expanding Rosslare Harbour and piggybacking on Brexit is the obvious answer to this problem, but maybe a harbour is too singular a focus around which to revive half a county.
18.8 Kilmore Quay
I plough on another 20k towards Kilmore Quay. It’s proper This is Belgium territory. My phone is dead so it’s a good excuse to ask for directions and listen to the locals who all have chainsaws and a double-take accent. Two aulflas on a wall tell me not to take the first road as it’s fierce rough, and it must be, because the one I’m on feels like a sector of Paris-Roubaix cobbles. I legiterally have to choose my line. I can barely understand the next fella but his directions tally with the signposts that start to emerge, so I’m clearly resurfacing. I eventually come to Kilmore – the plain one – and Mary Barry’s Seafood restaurant is jammers outside. It’s probably the place to be but I want to eat by the sea so I punch on to Kilmore Quay, which is a bit of a let down. Even the low-lying Saltee Islands across the water could do with a cheeky volcano or something. I ask a few heads where the swimspot is – never a good sign at the seaside – and my sense is that this is a fishing village with tourists attached. The central features of the town are the harbour – fair enough – and a roundabout too small to hang on to its traffic, like a small planet with too many moons.
There’s a casual looking seafood restaurant with a wodge of eaters outside so I decide to let the people’s choice dictate but it turns out to be a chipper and now I know my belly is gonna be up against it. I order fish, chips, coffee and beer, and I sit inside to write my notes and charge my Tony. I stay awhile, grab another Britney and then relieve myself in the Barryer. Waiting patiently outside is an aulwan who points out that I was in the Ladies Bathroom, as if I ought to have waited patiently outside the engaged men’s toilet. She’s one of those pass-remarkable tossers who have dominated the emotional pitch of this nation for longer than societal memory reaches back and we’ll be a happier people when we’ve shed her passive aggressive kind. I’m delighted to see her following me straight out as the smell must have put her off. It urns out to be a good thing cos I’ve left my Tony Blair in the Union. A couple of polite but cold Canadian cyclists are stationed outside. I yoink a dab of suncream off them while trying to have the craic but they need another twenty rubs of the green before they loosen up.
18.8.1 Head down
It’s my last pit stop and then I take the curiously straight road for Arthurstown and eventually left to Duncannon. I’ve never been happier to have a breeze on my face as I know I’ll be needing it on the way back. It’s 7 bells agin I arrive and the village is quiet for a summer’s evening, just a few teenage lads out aimlessly kicking a football in the town centre, where a few roads converge at a local minimum just up from the boola beach. Geegle Mops is pointing me up to the Fort but the lighthouse there is inaccessible and then a long-established Polish lady, with dog as big as my bike, sends me towards the other one. Ish. I pop down to the fishing port where a seasoned local knows his stuff. The North lighthouse, which we can see on high up the road, is in someone’s legiterally garden and the Commisioner of Irish Lights are fussy about people going in. Insurance and all the rest of it. A crap photo from here wil have to do. He tells me I’ll be able to view the other one from the strand, atop the cliff, round the corner. Thankfully the tide is out and I point the phone up and at it. You can only go in on a tour of the fort. I’m not bothered because this feels like a goalpost-touching exercise and I’m happy to let Lighthouse Pete, guesting on Tides and Tales blog, tell the story.
It’s after 4 now and I’ve still got nearly 80k to go, 40 to Duncannon and the same back to Wexford. I get my head down and cycle, via Duncormick, another village whose bay has been mostly cut off by a burrow. The fish and chips are rumbling in my Nedzer and I have to dismount and gag a few times. Never again. I soon arrive in Carrick-on-Bannow, familiar territory near where we camped last year after the Hook Head trip, the whole family, baby and cat included, althought poor Puddens ran off and hid in a ditch all weekend. There was a nice big barn for playing Jenga and drinking a bag of cans with the kids, but it wouldn’t be my go-to campsite for a Brad, Paddy and a Mexican. The proprietress, who farms cattle on the other side of said ditch, seemed to think it was a good idea to leave the electric fence on, telling me that everyone in Ireland knew how they worked. I told her that that my six year old from Dublin had unwittingly taken a widdle near it in the middle of the night. I take the bay road to Wellingtonbridge, knowing I’ll be able to look across at Clonmines, a well-preserved, abandoned Norman village which used to be a trading port. Again, the bay has been heavily silted and is no longer navigable. Wellingtonbridge, however, functions as a meeting point for Bannow Peninsula, the Hook Peninsula and the road to Wexford. I know the petrol station there has lots of charging points, and signs telling Van People not to be slopping out in the jacks, so I stall it there for some fluids. I’m getting worried it’ll be dark on my return leg so I ask the staff and they tell me there’s a LocalLink bus to Wexford at 8. They might not take my bike but it’s worth a try if needed.
At long last I can have a swim. I whip off my smelly gear, lob on my swimming jocks and run into to the ankle-high sea. I try to rinse myself quickly in the shallow water but it’s like being in a scabby bath that used to belong to your sister. My skin is encrusted with a day’s worth of crystallized salts. It’s like I’ve been rolled around a giant packet of dioralyte and I doubly regret not getting my rinse on in Kilmore Quay. I wish I could just lie back and chillax as the water is not punishingly cold, but I’m anxious to get the flock out of here and home before dark. One day I’ll learn to chill the kidneys. My Tony is brown bread again so I have to charge it in a shop while soothing myself with a quick cup of Afternoon Tea, sat on a wall, watching the chunflaz finishing up their kickabout.
18.8.2 Ballinaboola Lift
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In a bygone day I could have taken the Ballinaboola train out of Wellingtonbridge
It’s 730 now and I’ve got 38k back to Wexford which I’m hoping will take me two hours, with the wind on my back cancelling out the aches in my spine. Wellingtonbridge at 15k makes for a nice intermediary target, but the lumpiness of Waterford has leaked over the county border and I could really do without these undulations. I stop in Wellington bridge to take a photo of the abandoned train station, thinking of Irvine Welsh and how nothing ruins a community more than the removal of a working train station. I jump back on my bike and suddenly it won’t go. The derailleur cogs keep getting caught. I’m down there pulling and pushing at it but it’s no use. I’m stuck here and I’ve missed that 8pm bus. Luckily I’m right beside that petrol station – the centre of the local community – and I charge my phone and wash my filthy hands and face in the Union. I’ve no way home now except to call yer man James. There’s nothing that triggers my shame more than asking for help, especially for a lift, but he texts back immediately and says he’ll be there in half an hour, the ledgebag. Waiting for James is a welcome comedown from the brainfrazzling nature of cycling and I snuggle up at a table with a cup of green tea and watch the athletics. I feel great about myself for actually asking for help and I curiously realize I’ll keep more on top of my bike maintenance. If I’m going to rely on others to help me then I also have to do my bit and minimize the chance of catastrophe.
James rocks up in a van and steps out with a smile on his face but no shoes on his feet. He spots a missing screw in my derailleur and reckons I’ll need a newbie. Good excuse to bring the bike in and have its geometry rearranged too. He suggests I stall it back for a shower in his gaff and I offer to take us both out for some nosebag. We get down to a rapid-fire catch up of each other’s backstory, places he’s travelled to and the work he does with the homeless people of Wexford. He can’t offer me a bed because there is already a homeless guy on his couch-bed. Once he hears that I’m on the scratch myself he suggests we grab ingredients in a supermarket and cook it in his, with the excess groceries being my gift to him. So we park up by my Jammer outside Tesco, transfer my banjoed Paul van from his boot into mine, and then wander inside to get steak, eggs and a buncha man scran, although suddenly the bill has come to a helluvalot more than the pair of burritos I had had in mind. We spend the next two hours dosing up on each other’s life story. He moved here from South Africa as a toddler and still hasn’t gotten Four-Leaf Clover it. He’s clearly haunted by his childhood, and his adulthood, and mental illness in his own family and plenty more. Part of me wants to catch up again cos the craic is ninety and he seems to want to teach me about mechanics, but part of me is scared, as if I’ve been lured into his lair, a den of car engines, Buddha singing bowls and unputaway nicknacks. I have a shower and I’m half thinking he’s going to get me afterwards, so I breathe easy when I do finally get out of there. I’m on the road after 11 and I stop off en route to rest awhile and watch Sharlene and Rhasidat winning yet another medal in the athletics, a joyous reminder of those glorious childhood summers when Sonyer O’Sullivan brought so much joy into my family home.