The Wild Atlantic Way Continues...

After a better nights sleep next to the sea, we awoke to the sound of people getting ready to swim a 7am. After watching for awhile, we packed up and headed on our way.

The day was made up of visiting stone circles, looking at castles/hill forts, wandering on deserted beaches and generally just being a tourist. 

There is a tarmac road up to the radio masts at Mount Gabriel, which then offers some great views over the coastal plain down to Schull. We met a group of road bikers up there and an English couple who were renovating a house on the nearby peninsula. 

We eventually found one of our best wild campsites for the night on a headland overlooking a village and the sea here. 

One of things that is becoming apparent here is the bikes are unusual. Every time we stop somewhere, someone comes over for a chat, to find out who we are, where we are from etc. Then the conversations all turn to the bikes and our setup. The locals love the fact that we are here to visit their country and often point us to nice places and things to see.
It's so refreshing after too much time in England with it's constant negativity and pointless criticism's of everything these days.

Right, wine and food time!

Ireland: The Wild Atlantic Way.

This trip started out as a conversation over a beer or two in a curry house in Hampshire. We couldn't decide between visiting Shetland and Orkney or Ireland. A toss of the coin decided it!!

So two of us on two KTM 690 Enduros, a bit of research and here I am, sat on a ferry just coming into Belfast harbour as I write this. The sun is shining, the roads are dry and I'm about to disembark.

Armagh is the planned meet up with Gareth, a long time riding buddy, who is also Irish. Plenty of Guinness and a bunch of seafood along the Wild Atlantic Way is the very basic plan. 
I'd set up a route traversing down through the centre of Ireland. As it turned out, most of these roads had a good grassy line down the middle of them, so it felt a bit more like green lane riding. Ireland doesn't have a network of green lanes as such, but there are some roads that are still unsealed or are ancient drove roads etc, so hunting them out was a vague part of the plan for this trip.

It takes around 2 days to go from Belfast to Cork via the middle bit and on these small roads. So our first night's camp was in a forest half way down, no wind, tucked away from the world and with a million midges for company!

 A nice smoky fire soon sorted that, the bottle of wine helped and a good time was had to catch up on gossip after our take away dinner of kebabs from an 'authentic' Italian pizza place run by a lovely Pakistani family!

Day 2 saw us getting separated because of missing turns and also found us chatting to a local farmer, who hadn't seen a motorbike in months apparently and was curious about us. We also found our first green lane!

The centre of Ireland is mainly an undulating landscape, with a lot of lakes and small hamlets/farms. There is a lot of moorland to traverse, which provides some great scenery too and hardly any traffic.

We eventually got to the south coast at a small pace called Kinsale. This is the official start of the WWW. This is where our trip started properly. The route has changed over the years and now uses a lot of the bigger roads, mainly to accommodate the campers and dodgy drivers who come for a visit. We naturally decided to follow all of the smaller coast hugging roads, as on a bike, they are easy to get past any obstacles and you get a better sense of the locals on these less travelled roads. 

Our first coastal camp was in a picnic area overlooking a small bay with a boat slipway onto a sandy sea floor. Gareth went for a swim after all the local ladies had done their sea swimming exercise for the evening and we then got out the stove and some wine to round off the day.

The wild swimming became a theme of the trip, everywhere we stopped along the coast, people would be out in the sea, getting some exercise and enjoying the good weather. Alongside that theme, there were also towers, lots of towers!

Grand day for sure!!