Derelict cottages, more weight to carry, icy roads and stinging sleet

Gear-testing cycles the week before we set off!

All mod cons including graffiti - taking shelter in a derelict cottage in Co Kilkenny. Photo: Mark Graham

“Oh wow, this is ideal!”

Not a sentence that most people would utter if they saw the inside of a certain derelict cottage in County Kilkenny where Spoke Yokes were standing.

Graffiti ranging from standard cock-and-balls to more sinister swastikas and racist slurs, every window in the place smashed out, and the floor strewn with rubble, but no smashed bottles or visible glass on the floor, and no signs that the poor old wreck of a farm cottage had been used as a toilet.

On top of that, it was bone dry, with space to pitch the tent, and there were any number of nails protruding from the long-neglected walls for us to hang stuff and dry our gear.

We smiled at each other in delight. For tonight…home sweet home.

It was four in the afternoon, bitter sleet had been stinging our faces for the past 15km, and we hadn’t made the headway we wanted because we started what we had hoped would be an 84km loop of North Kilkenny, taking in Castlecomer and Freshford, early in the morning on heavily iced roads.

This was incredibly slow-going for the first hour or so, with a fresh stretch of slick ice around each bend. As with driving, you just don’t want to find yourself braking on an unexpected ice patch, and so the only way is slow and steady.

On top of this, it was my first ever time using front pannier bags - I know, I know, for all our other journeys I’ve always just overloaded the back and endured the horrible sensation of the front of the bike lifting off the road on steep gradients - and front panniers take some getting used to, and I was doing it on ice.

I wobbled around the icy church car park at Ballyfoyle where we were starting our cycle, trying to get used to the extra weight and the extra muscular effort to control turns as Mark loaded the last of his stuff onto his bike.

This was the big one: the last opportunity for both of us to test all our gear and to get used to the weight of our fully laden bikes. I’m writing this on Sunday: early weekdays next week will mostly be taken up with tying off various loose threads - Mark a PhD paper to submit, me a full podcast season for 2025 to deliver - and spending time with family and loved ones.

Next Friday morning, we set off from Tramore to Rosslare to jump on the ferry. The excitement is building.

A fully laden bike is such a completely different beast, and cycling one such a different activity, that we really needed this weekend in the saddle. But then came Storm Eowyn, and so we were becalmed all Friday, getting bits and bobs done, but kind of restless.

The evening before, we collected my bike from Altitude in Waterford city. My bike is a 15-year-old Trek Hybrid, not really designed for touring at all, but despite this, I have crossed 17 land borders to date on it, and want to add many more. Mark availed of the government bike-to-work scheme in 2020 and got himself a fantastically sturdy touring bike, but I was stubborn: no new bike for me.

This is partly for environmental reasons - I just refuse to scrap a perfectly good bike frame, especially when mine has carbon fibre forks and is therefore largely unrecyclable - and partly because I just love that damned bike so much and have spent so much time on it. It just needed a shocking amount of work to get it road-proof.

As it happened, the poor old thing is now so much new that it is really like Trigger’s broom from Only Fools and Horses: Altitude’s amazing mechanic Dave fitted an entire new drive train and bottom bracket, front and rear wheels and all new cables, replaced the rear pannier rack and installed a new one on the front that I had sourced online: this is an axle-mounted design because my bike is actually not set up for a front rack at all.

When we collected my gloriously kitted out bike, Dave gave us the most incredible evening workshop on bike maintenance, on everything from removing wheel buckles to taking the back cassette off to replace spokes, to some fantastic tips and hacks for quick roadside repairs. We both kept looking at each other and saying, “why didn’t we do this years ago?!”

It was a pleasure to spend time with someone with such expertise and knowledge and dedication to his craft.

Saturday, when the storm had passed, would be the last chance to get out for an overnight cycle and camp, even though the forecast was for -2 C overnight, with rain sleet and hail from early afternoon.

Because of the morning ice and the extra weight, we over-estimated how many kilometres we would do, and by 4pm, the sleet reddening our cheeks and our fingers growing numb, we ditched the idea of making it to the woodland destination we had decided on and pledged to stop at any new camping opportunity we happened upon.

Which is how and why we found ourselves in Maison de la Cock-and-balls at dusk, cheerily boiling water for tea, stretching out the washing line and putting up the tent. With the temperature dropping, after a dinner of noodles there wasn’t much else to do but turn in, something I imagine we’ll get used to, and am kind of looking forward to on the road: letting light dictate when we sleep and rise, instead of alarm clocks.

Mark kindly refrained from mentioning ghosts until the following morning and so we passed a long but actually quite cosy night, sheltered from the worst of the wind, and without hearing a single ghostly footstep on the stair.

Come 7am, we were making more tea, eating a breakfast of boiled eggs and bread, and making sure we left the derelict house in exactly the same sorry state we found it. With more rain and sleet forecast, we did a further 30km or so, through Kilkenny town (Mark won’t let me write “city”) and back to where the van was parked at Ballyfoyle, and were pretty damned cold, but very giddy and happy, when we got off the bikes.

90-odd kilometres all told, not bad considering the conditions, and a cause for optimism that we won’t flake out on our very first day on the road in under a weeks’ time. And who knows - we may even get a lovely crisp bright early spring day for it, instead of sleet and ungodly headwinds!

Your offerings to the weather gods all gratefully received.

Hold her steady, and stay between the ditches.

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