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Denry takes a fall
Blustery bogland biking
Then a playboy lunch
We will be spending the next two days almost entirely within the barony of Erris, 360 square miles of [mostly] “blanket bog”. We can hardly wait.
There is talk at breakfast about how the name of our destination should be pronounced. It is in the heart of the Gaeltacht and the anglicised version of the name is absent from all the road signs. We take a crash course in Irish phonetics, which are pretty strict, but we are not much the wiser, and googling the pronunciation gives us something quite horrible (Byal un WUR-hed). Never mind.
Dave’s overnight research of the area has uncovered two stories about the town. Maybe there are more interesting ones, but we rather doubt it. The first is that the king’s men, in capturing some pirates, ended up in the “wrong” bay. So the townsfolk built a canal between the two bays, and this was useful for a while, until it silted up. Wow!
The second story concerns a 1958 operation to build a new fence, which the local builders refused to erect because it was going through the middle of the faeries’ home. No one else would agree to put it up, so the council had to relent and build the fence around the faerie enclave. NIMBYs, even in Ireland.
I’m on driving duty first thing, which is slightly annoying as heavy rain is forecast for the afternoon. I take off to Geesala/Gweesalia [Gaoth Sáile] a village depicted in Synge’s “Playboy of the Western World”. We saw a National Theatre production of this play less than two weeks ago, and the place is as bleak as I expected, even though the usual horizontal rain is missing today. The shebeen in the play has been replaced by a modern hotel and the Millington bar is there to honour the author. But there is nothing to detain me at this time of day, and I blast back to Bangor Erris, to meet the others.
The boys make very good time to get to the rendezvous point, and are full of it. Den has provided great entertainment by taking a ten foot drop into a rhododendron bush trying to investigate a discarded car door which he has taken to be potentially valuable. Quite how he thought he would take home a metal panel of that size is a mystery to us all.
We check out the pronunciation of our destination with the locals and it turns out to be more like “Byal a MUR-hed” than the google version. But it needs to be said with an Irish lilt to get it spot on.
After another 20 miles of blustery pedalling round Doohoma headland, Nigel decides to make a break for the finishing line, while the rest of us dive into Millingtons, where a genial barman serves us a most excellent lunch at a cut price rate. We all agree that Guinness 0.0 is perfect for cyclists at midday, leaving the real stuff for evening consumption.
In short order we are down the road in Béal an Mhuirthead, where there is a surfeit of Church Roads and Church Streets. So we have a lot of fun and games finding our digs. When we eventually get to the right place, we are delighted to find that our entrance is a matter of 50 feet from the back door of McDonnells, the pub which was recommended to us by our friendly barman…
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