Day 1: Dublin Mullingar

Day2: Mullingar Strokestown

Day3: Strokestown Charlestown

Day4: Charlestown Newport

The trip was completed by Sinead McDermott, Alastair McDermott, Paul Morton, Bruce Ryan, Mike McCarthy, Mike Millar, Joe McDermott. Back up was by Pauline McDermott and Cepta Morton. Day 1 and 2 were bright and sunny overall. Day 3 was brutal, cycling into a hurricane, branches littering the road sides, driving rainshowers. Day 4 and the wind eased somewhat and it was dry. Personally I felt very good considering I had just had my appendix removed!!

view along the canal tow path

smooth cycling along the canal

There is a nice biking and hiking route from Castlebar and the National Museum at Turlough, to Bohola on grassy back roads, even linking up to Kiltamagh!!! Almost no traffic, forests, bogs and cattle grazing in fields of green. sorry no pics…. next time.

Castlebar Bohola Castlebar road biking at EveryTrail
EveryTrail

Story:

Great day …this opening of The Great Western Green way. The Taoiseach [Prime Minister] Enda Kenny led the peloton as we set out from Westport, to Newport, Mulrany and into Achill Sound. It is wonderful to have a Taoiseach who can participate comfortably in such a cycle trip. Michael Ring, Minister for Tourism also did the entire trip. The sun shone and everybody was happy with the trip, not one for speed records though!!! This Taoiseach is very well liked and hundreds came out to see the peloton. That meant lots of stops and tapes to be cut etc. A hard core of 40 plus cyclists did the entire trip, while many locals joined us for short distances. It was enjoyable to spin along and chat with the Taoiseach, and for a few hours he had no cares to attend to, just the chat and banter that accompanies a peloton as it travels along. We all enjoyed ourselves. Well done everybody who played any part in putting this Great Western Greenway in place, especially the land owners whose generosity of spirit is to be acknowledged.

All along they way we had readings, reflections, discussions, on each author. This was cultural and literary paradise. The fellowship worked well, everybody contributed to the experience. and so a special thank you to everybody who made the journey so enjoyable.

The McDermott’s are surviving the worst that fate can throw at them!!! Joe is retired now for 3 years and developing other ideas. Included is some part time work for The Retirement Planning Council of Ireland. His other activities include preparing digital heritage guides, “apps” for smart phones, a departure from writing guide books, yet he continues to prepare a new guide, one that will describe an ancient Celtic route from the high king’s seat in mid Connacht to Croagh Patrick. Hiking n biking are still his favourite activities. And he looks forward to each year’s Sierra trip. An old Sierra colleague, Paddy Colgan passed away this year, Pauline and Joe had visited him just last year, at La Honda CA.

Pauline has just retired and is taking a break. She will be missed as an innovator in Mayo Community Education circles. Now for that fiddle and accordion!!! Thanks to our new cycle track, The Great Western Greenway, she too is back on the bike. Lots of reading, philosophy and new thinking are on her present menu. She recently gave the Sunday address to our Unitarian Church; in fact the McDermott’s conducted the entire service, except for the choir.

Alastair continues to work alone, as with all businesses times are tough, but if he makes it through this recession, well who knows how successful things will be. Rugby and cycling are high on his agenda, still playing social rugby, giving and taking hits!!!

Sinead just finished her Master’s Degree in Community Education. However for some time she has been planning to pursue her interests in complementary healing, counselling and all that goes with that life style. By all accounts she is gifted, and is developing a client base that includes many professionals, medical and otherwise. Spiritwise is the name of her project.

The last year has seen us develop the house; making many changes to layout etc. this is nearly at an end now. Pauline and Joe visited Crete this past summer, with Pauline’s Greek and Roman studies all those years ago at University; it was so much more interesting. Finally we went to Massachusetts in The Fall. This was a great trip, visiting Boston and the early Unitarian Churches there, talking about people like Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Alcott’s, Hawthorne, and Thoreau. Walking around Walden Pond, reflecting on the ideas of Thoreau was a truly good experience. We were stood on the Bridge at Concorde and Lexington Common too, where the first shots of the American Revolution were fired.

So despite our countries plight at the hands of our incompetents, we had a good 2010. We wish next year to be as good for us and for all our friends and acquaintances.

Slan is Beannacht [good health and blessings be upon you]

Pilgrimage is not usually a term one might associate with Unitarians. One hardly thinks of us outside of the realms of reason and logic. Yet Michael Servitus may have been on a form of pilgrimage in search of personal freedom as he walked from Spain into France and onward.

For me this is a word resonant with life, with meaning, with purpose, with freedom. I am constantly in a state of pilgrimage. A dictionary would refer to pilgrimage as “a long journey or search of great moral significance.” I want to explain explore what those few words mean to me.

I have written and spoken before of the experience of walking the Croagh Patrick Heritage Trail and how it resonated with me as I explored that sacred landscape.

However it is important for me to make clear that that trail is only one of many that animate me with the possibility of the spiritual. I am constantly returning to places, more often long trails where in the words of TS Eliot:

“We must not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we began and to know the place for the first time.”

I believe that herein lies the secret of a spiritual life or as near as one can get to that ideal. Exploring the lonely roads of Mayo as Raiftery an file did in the 18th century, I wander along lost in personal reverie. This is but a metaphor for a personal search for meaning.

Recently I walked from Bellacorick [there was a peat burning power station there from 1956 till a year or so ago] to Ballycastle on the North Mayo coast, to Buntrahir bay where the ancient peoples who lived at Ceide Fields may well have come ashore, after their long journey from what we now call Brittany in Northern France.
This was a hike through Ireland’s “Big sky Country” over 26 kilometres of lonely forestry tracks and over open bogland, by Sheskin Lodge where once the Jameson Whiskey family held summer parties for huntsmen and family friends. Today it sprawls in semi ruin, like Shelly’s Ozymandias, and I am “the Traveler from an antique land” who relates it’s tale to himself.

There is reason there is no reason, like a demented Beckett character I mull over many rational and irrational ideas as I traipse along free from all human connection, from responsibility, from all responsibility, from reason, from freedom, from tolerance. From a time I am at one with myself, with nature, with the immediacy of my small universe, I am Unitarian manifested. Do I arrive at any great resolution? No! but the process is all. For me it is my Unitarianism.

This is the closest I will ever get to epiphany, to considering, to accepting that there may be something beyond good and evil, beyond this existence. My agnosticism wavers for a moment and I experience the delight of the instant, the possibility of god….. The possibility that I……….. or more correctly that we …….. are god.

This occurs, where I can walk unhindered, my thoughts unfettered, free to go where they will. This is my pilgrimage.

New bike rental agencies emerged to do business. B/B’s experienced a new phenomenon – Bike Helmets – high tech pumps – instead of fishing rods.

We are on the cusp of a tourism paradigm shift here in West Mayo. Newport is poised to become the biking centre of Ireland. Remember Stradballey and steam, now Electric Picnic? We can do that too.

The Greenway has created a spinal column to which Newport can add the limbs of electric assisted bicycling, and off road intermediate mountain biking. And of course pure mountain biking …. the trail already exists in Letterkeen Wood, it just needs tweeking.

Such a route as the Achill Spur hiking trail would be an excellent intermediate mountain bike trail. The Western Way from Derry near Bellacorrick south through the forest is already in used by some. Srahmore and Letterkeen wood are a haven for such off road trails. With a little adjustment here and there they would be first class. There is physical challenge, wild wilderness, astounding scenery such as anything I have seen in Oregon or Washington state where such trail cycling is enjoyed.

So what do we need to do? Not a lot really, marketing certainly but the Greenway cannot have cost a lot in marketing? So get out and utilize the existing bog roads, forestry trails, signboard them! signpost them! map them! Make .gpx files available to users.

Encourage the RRO and Trails people to promote them. Educate the Tourism people to their existence and usability. The Great western Greenway is a great success, it can be an entree to other forms of off road biking.

There are other bikers out there who crave such experiences, I mountain biked in Moab Utah last year, slick rock cycling they called it. We could only go out at seven o’clock in the morning or late in the evening. They hankered after a drop of cool rain!!! Imagine that!

Imagine building on the concept of the Greenway … Rails to trails…. how about a cycling Museum in Newport, somewhere in my archive of old Newport photos there is one of two High Nellies leaning against a wall!!!

A sunny day on the Achill Spur Nephin Mountains Newport Mayo