Cycling 100 years ago

Qualitymark

Extract from a letter from Thomas MacDonagh April 16, 1913, from the Ranfurly Arms Hotel, Dungannon, to his wife, Muriel:


My dearest love,
I miscalculated this pen of mine. The ink is already gone. I hope I shall be able to go on writing with this, dipping as with an ordinary pen. It seems to write all right.
This is a damned dull place. I have just come in from a bicycle ride. I never was in such a hilly country. It is all like the road up to Grange House [Haroldsgrange, Rathfarnham]. Bicycling is no good here...
The boy is asleep by this and John and you are splitting a bottle of stout - or have you a party? I must get up at 6 or so to be down in the school at 9.30 - though indeed this is a tiny place, everywhere is a stairs through from everywhere else.
The country around is rather like Cloughjordan - in water, and a fair amount of trees and good land - but not Knocknacree [Wood] around or anything like it, I think. I have never gone riding out as I did to night since I was in Kilkenny... in 1901 and 1902. Since there was always some kind of purpose or place to get at or someone with me - or the country was different. This might be Kilkenny too...

thebouldwhacker

Hey, nearly out of credit so texting you instead of ringing.
No WiFi in the hotel so went for a spin.
Map my ride was way off, I hit a few hill climbs that I wasn't expecting. Garmin is showing that it was like the hill at home that you had to walk the end of.
You on the rip tonight?
This really reminds me of the marble city sportif and woodstock coming out of no where!!
Wtf


Not much changes......

Qualitymark

The newfangled pen, by the way, was a fountain pen - damn technology! And the 'John' was Muriel's sister, always so called in her family (it was her pen name).

rflynnr

William Bulfin's "Rambles in Eireann" a 1907 account of cycling around Ireland is worth looking up if the first post has whetted your appetite for this sort of stuff.

Qualitymark

rflynnr wrote: »

William Bulfin's "Rambles in Eireann" a 1907 account of cycling around Ireland is worth looking up if the first post has whetted your appetite for this sort of stuff.

And here it is: http://archive.org/details/ramblesineirinn00bulfrich

Bunnyhopper

That archive.org PDF seems to be only part of it. There's a 1915 edition here:

http://www.askaboutireland.ie/reading-room/digital-book-collection/digital-books-by-subject/geography-of-ireland/bulfin-rambles-in-eirinn/

I like this bit, where he meets an English motorcyclist who's feeling seasick from the state of the roads. Clearly it's unpatriotic when we complain about the state of cycle lanes

I halted in a shady hollow under Clonaslee, not to rest or to loiter,
but to visit the sick. My motor cyclist was there by the roadside,
reclining on the grass, his head-dress lying beside him, his leathern
tunic open, his limbs contracted, his face pale and sickly. Both his
hands were pressed upon his stomach, and he moaned faintly. The motor
cycle stood over him and, as if in sorrow at the contemplation of its
work, it was blackening the dust with oily tears.

"Oh, it is nothing at all," he said, peevishly, in reply to my enquiry
into the cause of the trouble, "I shall be all right in a few minutes. I
met with no accident at all. It was simply those beastly roads. They
would sicken a cart horse. They would shake a stone crusher to jelly.
Never saw such a beastly shame - all bumps and ruts and holes. I have
been suffering from a slight indisposition since my sea-sickness on that
beastly passage last night, and this horrible road has finished me. Look
at it! Did anyone ever see such a public road in any civilised country!
Why it is worse than a blawsted lane. If this is the way your precious
Councils do their road-making you ought to hang them."

I disagreed with him on principle, and said that the road was all right.
But it was all wrong. I would not admit that for the whole world to the
Sassenach, although I had been vainly trying to find a smooth place for
the past hour. I had been suffering from the bumps and ruts myself, and
had been dimly wondering what might be the sensations of a motor cyclist
in negotiating the high road from Rosenallis to Clonaslee. But I stood
by the County Council, District Councils, contractors and inspectors.
The motor cyclist was disgusted.

Qualitymark

Incidentally, the wild duck and three "flappers" - "flappers" was in Bulfin's day (1907) a slang term for young girls under 16, whose flapping long hair hadn't yet been put up. In the 1920s it was transferred to the young women whose immature lack of stateliness was objected to by the establishment.

tomasrojo

I really like the prose styles. Bit Jerome K Jerome.

manwithaplan

Muriel put the bike up on donedeal three years later.

Qualitymark

Both the letter-writer and the person it was written to would be dead five years later, and the child referred to and his sister orphaned at the age of five and two.

Lusk Doyle

Qualitymark wrote: »

Both the letter-writer and the person it was written to would be dead five years later, and the child referred to and his sister orphaned at the age of five and two.

Jeez, way to kill the mood!

Bunnyhopper

Qualitymark wrote: »

Both the letter-writer and the person it was written to would be dead five years later, and the child referred to and his sister orphaned at the age of five and two.

If only they'd had hi-viz and helmets in those days.

manwithaplan

Bunnyhopper wrote: »

If only they'd had hi-viz and helmets in those days.

True. It was a death trap up around Kilmainham.