McDonagh’s Lane (2.2km, 111m, 5.0%)

Map and elevation profile of McDonagh's Lane climb

Strava

Prior to the lockdowns I had only ridden McDonagh’s Lane once, in the course of the gruelling Red Line/Red Lane 600, an experience that left me ill-inclined to revisit it. But its position just inside the boundaries of Dublin county offered plausible deniability, not that the Guards manning the checkpoints at Brittas ever bothered to stop me to check my credentials. It turns out to be a peach of climb — quiet, well-paved, and scenic.

The lane is easily overlooked, running up the side of the Blue Gardenia pub on the N81 around Brittas. Be in the small ring as you make the turn — the gradient quickly reaches double digits, then slackens briefly before rising to 15%. The impeccable surface of the road takes some of the sting out of the steep sections but they’re still demanding. The road is very narrow at this point so pray that you don’t meet a car coming the other way that might force you to stop.

The gradient eases as the road continues upwards in a series of steps. A slanted T-junction announces the final push — beware of vehicles coming from the right as you swing left around the bend — before the long drag to the top of the hill. Houses and neat hedges give way to pasture on the left and the edge of Saggart woods on the right, with the N81 trailing away down below. At the top, enjoy the sweeping vista of the mountains to the east and flat lands to the west, the Slieve Blooms barely breaking the horizon.

Handmade sign, painted on of planks nailed to a post: Aquatic Village, 7 days 10.30 until 6, No Tossers
Fair.

Fruit Market

Drastic Season by African Head Charge

Of course, if we’re talking about post-punk dub, it’s impossible to look past Adrian Sherwood and On-U Sound. African Head Charge are also on the bill for Le Guess Who—no indication whether Sherwood will be manning the sound desk but you never know.

It’s probably too much to hope that they’ll play anything from their third album, Drastic Season, released a full forty years ago now. I’m no On-U Sound expert, but this goes as far out as anything I’ve heard, the entire sound-field yawing and warping as Sherwood works the faders. “Fruit Market” is perhaps the easiest track on the album to parse, the horn refrain acting as a guiding light through the chaos, but it’s still head-melting stuff.

Bonus track: Bonjo Iyabinghi Noah and Adrian Sherwood pick ten Head Charge classics for the Quietus.

Susuro

Deliverance And Spiritual Warfare by Holy Tongue

The curators and initial line-up for Le Guess Who were announced a few weeks ago…time to do some homework. Valentina Magaletti looks to be the Zelig of the 2023 edition — I count at least three of her projects on the bill (Holy Tongue, Moin, and a duo with Marta Salogni).

I already had my eye on the Holy Tongue album after a glowing write-up from Phil Freeman (Burning Ambulance, the Wire). As he says, you could slip most of the album into a post-punk dub DJ set without anyone blinking an eye, but more than Public Image Ltd. or African Head Charge, “Susuro” reminds me of Can circa Ege Bamyasi, or prime Mouse on Mars. A shoe-in if Kevin Martin ever resurrects the Macro Dub Infection compilation series!

Bohernabreena Reservoir (45km, 695m)

Map of Bohernabreena Reservoir route

RideWithGPS

Categorised Climbs: Ballinascorney (First Section), Cunard Road Lower, Cunard Road Upper

Variation upon variation — this is a third way to skin the Piperstown/Glenasmole cat. It’s the most scenic option of the three, but also the hardest, featuring the short but salutary climb up Cunard Road Lower along with the demanding final kilometre of Cunard Road Upper. It would be hard to find a route that packs so much into a couple of hours so close to the city centre.

Head out of the city through Old Bawn and past the entrance to Bohernabreena reservoir to start the climb up to Ballinascorney. Take the left turn after the Footee course, as the road widens and curves right. The road above the reservoir is a joy: quiet, well-paved, tree-lined, with occasional glimpses of the water below. Follow the road around the back of the reservoir to a T-junction: left here, then the next right to take on the 15% ramp of Cunard Road Lower. Right at the top to join Cunard Road Upper — you’ll have a few moments to catch your breath before the grind up to the Featherbeds. Turn left at the T with Military Road, then the usual drop down by the Viewing Point and Cruagh Road to Tibradden, and along Pine Forest Road to Glencullen.

The only likely hazard (aside from knee trouble) is the descent down the back of the reservoir. The road itself is fine, but it’s winding and very narrow with no visibility around the corners — it’s very easy to round a corner at speed to meet a Land Rover coming the other way, with no scope for evasive manoeuvres. Don’t ask me how I know this.

Pasture leading down to the Upper Lake of Bohernabreena Reservoir, mountains in the background
The Upper Lake of Bohernabreena Reservoir, glittering in the sunshine

Lotta Continua

Rectangular white and blue sign reading Pure Mile No Littering Please on a post at the roadside

I must have cycled past PURE Mile signs hundreds of times before I finally checked to see what they were, who was behind them. PURE (Protecting Uplands and Rural Environments) works to reduce littering and illegal dumping in the Dublin and Wicklow mountains. There’s a welter of local government and semi-state bodies involved, but the litter-picking is mostly done by groups of volunteers. PURE provide the equipment and collect the filled rubbish sacks. The website doesn’t provide any obvious means of getting in contact with nearby groups, which seems like an omission, but after a string of emails and a couple of false starts, Celeste got us on the distribution list for the Friends of the South Dublin Uplands. Largely drawn from a hiking club, the Friends meet every month or two to clean up Military Road, Piperstown Road and Cunard Road, some of my favourite roads to cycle.

Spending an hour or two of a Sunday morning walking the verges and clambering over ditches with a litter-picker and blue rubbish sack in hand gives you pause for thought about your fellow man. I mean, we’ve all had evenings where, faced with the prospect of doing the dishes, it seemed easier to load the lot into the back of a car, drive up into the mountains, and smash the entire dinner service, plate by plate, in a lay-by. I can imagine that in the rosy post-coital glow, it seems less than urgent to retrieve your jocks from the thicket of brambles where you flung them in the throes of raw animal passion. But I struggle to fathom the purblind selfishness behind the most routine littering, the scurf of plastic bottles and coffee cups dropped from the windows of passing cars (unsurprisingly, far heavier on the side of the road outbound from Dublin). I am compiling a list of products that should henceforth be sold only under license, with stringent requirements around traceability and disposal: wet wipes, nitrous oxide canisters, and Red Bull are top of the list.

Nature engulfs some of these alien artefacts impressively quickly — you often step on what appears to be solid turf only to hear the crumple of a plastic bottle, prelude to a couple of minutes wrestling to unearth the errant container. But the rest remain an eyesore, a constant visual reminder of human thoughtlessness and waste. On the last Sunday excursion, I filled nearly three sacks with the detritus scattered along lightly-trafficked Cunard Road, all discarded in the month since the previous pick. It’s satisfying work, but Sisyphean — I’ve passed along our stretch of Military Road a couple of times since and already a fresh crop is sprouting.

Blue plastic rubbish sack with Pure branding, standing on a ditch, mountains in the background
The Blue Bag of Happiness

Trooperstown Hill (1.9km, 146m, 7.5%)

Map and elevation profile of Trooperstown Hill climb

Strava

At the time of writing, a mere 255 riders have ridden this segment on Strava, as compared to just shy of 10,000 for Wicklow Gap, so I feel confident in describing it as a hidden gem. You can find steeper, longer climbs on the west coast (Caherdaniel, may you live in infamy!) but there aren’t many other climbs in Wicklow that compare — Devil’s Glen, perhaps.

The headline numbers for the climb undersell it considerably. The gentle rise along the first kilometre from Bookey Bridge reduces the average gradient to an innocuous-seeming 7.5%, but the 900 meters after the turn average a very respectable 11% and the final ramp hits 18%. There are moments where the road appears to flatten but recovery is not easily come by — they’re still 8–9%.

The surface is heavy and there isn’t much to look at on the way up (you’ll be too busy trying to keep your front wheel planted anyway) but the views from the shoulder of the hill and the gradual descent on the other side are delightful.

Rough country road lined with hedgerows rising steeply to a left-hand bend
The final ramp. To quote Alice Cooper, “I’m eighteen…and I like it”

Trooperstown (93km, 1342m)

Map of Trooperstown route

RideWithGPS

Categorised Climbs: Edmondstown Road, Lough Bray, Trooperstown Hill

This route is a variation on the basic Laragh route, taking in the under-appreciated (and somewhat brutal) climb of Trooperstown Hill, so check the notes on that for the sections shared by both routes.

When you reach Laragh, go left at Lynham’s pub to take the road for Rathdrum. Take the left immediately before Bookey Bridge and climb gently for about a kilometer, then a sharp left onto the Trooperstown climb proper, which is anything but gentle. The reward comes afterwards, on the long, gradual descent around the curve of the hill — the views across the valley are lovely and you usually have the road entirely to yourself. There are a couple of tight bends and sections with loose gravel but it’s not particularly steep. At the bottom you run into the Moneystown road heading towards Roundwood. Rejoin the Laragh route just before the drag up to Ballinastoe.

The route works well in reverse too also, turning Trooperstown into a gentle, winding ascent. You’ll be riding the brakes all the way down the other side though.

Green fields and trees with mountains in the background under an almost cloudless blue sky
Looking north-east from Trooperstown Hill

From Centre to Wave

The original incarnation of Loop endured for a scant five years at the tail end of the eighties, achieving their moment of aesthetic perfection with A Gilded Eternity and the “Arc-Lite” single, then splitting. Over the course of three albums, they pared away the extraneous, cutting out the crawling wah-wah guitar solos to leave only riffs like pulsar transmissions. No harmonic development, just drilling, distortion-drenched guitar riffs repeated over circling, tom-heavy rhythms. I can think of few other bands with the same commitment to repetition, to this kind of formal purity — Lungfish, maybe, or Wire in their terse, abrasive early days. Absent the consolations of Spacemen 3’s religiosity, A Gilded Eternity evoked a bleak, post-industrial landscape, blackened and smoke-wreathed.

After the split, Robert Hampson briefly joined Godflesh, playing on half of their third album, Pure (itself a monolithic aesthetic statement), before forming Main, with Loop’s other guitarist, Scott Dawson. Main continued the programme of reduction, quickly dispensing with drums, ultimately with guitars (and Dawson), the music so rarefied and abstracted that Main seemed to vanish into the ether, presence slipping imperceptibly into absence. It’s surprising that the last Main album appeared as late as 2013, less surprising that it appeared on Peter Rehberg’s Editions Mego label, a distance remove from rock and its mythologies. I believe Hampson spent a while leading a hand-to-mouth existence in Paris, working on electro-acoustic composition at GRM.

The return of Loop has been slow and faltering, bursts of activity separated by long periods of silence. A comprehensive reissue campaign around 2008, comprising the three albums with attendant radio sessions and demos, and the three-CD set rounding up non-album tracks. A triumphant headline set at All Tomorrow’s Parties in 2013 that recalled the thrill of the very first gigs I went to as a teenager: Sonic Youth, the Shamen, Dinosaur Jr., My Bloody Valentine, Fugazi…Loop. That all signals jammed feeling, complete sensory overload: the thick fog of dry ice and staccato glare of strobe lights, the brain-capsizing volume and distortion, the suffocating crush of bodies yearning to be closer to the stage. A new EP in 2015, Array 1, notionally the first of a trilogy that was never completed, derailed perhaps by the collapse of the ATP organisation. Scattered live appearances — I caught a lacklustre night at Le Poisson Rouge in New York. In 2022 a new album, Sonancy, released incongruously on Cooking Vinyl, a label linked indelibly in my mind with Michelle Shocked and the Cowboy Junkies. Momentum again halted, this time by Covid, postponing the accompanying tour.

Postponed until last Saturday, at Whelan’s. The usual apprehension about seeing a band you love, long after the fact, the fear of seeing something dismal, embarrassing, that might sour you on them forever. I’m not convinced by Sonancy, the sound too clean, too precise, too light. I’m don’t know whether Loop would welcome the comparison, but it stands in the same relation to A Gilded Eternity as Hawkwind’s late-seventies albums do to Doremi Fasol Latido. Recognisably the same band but lacking the thickness, the heft, that steely-eyed gaze into the infinite.

Sonancy by Loop

The venue was half-empty when I arrived, knots of greying men checking each other’s credentials, seeing who was at the gig in McGonagle’s in 1991. Robert invoked the thirty-two year gap since their last visit to Ireland many times throughout the evening. More subtly, the EU flag draped over his amplifier sported only twelve stars, as it did back then. They played a long set, an hour and forty-five minutes — this tour the last run for the older material, he warned. And it was terrific, not a moment too long. The rhythm section (Wayne Maskell and Hugo Morgan from the Heads) were locked in, the guitars were shearing and relentless. Two incredible songs where Robert sculpted feedback into something of unearthly beauty. The new songs sounded more powerful live, the slow-burn set-closer “Aurora” a particular highlight. Against all my expectations, Loop are back. Don’t miss them.

The Embankment (3.2km, 106m, 3.3%)

Map and Elevation Profile of the Embankment climb

Strava

The Embankment only barely qualifies as a categorised climb, requiring judicious choice of start and end points to make the grade. It’s a rather featureless climb, three kilometers at a very steady 3–4% gradient along the N81. Despite being an N-road, the N81 is fairly narrow, with little in the way of hard shoulder to hide in as the HGVs thunder past. There’s nothing much in the way of scenery.

So why mention it? Because it has the cardinal virtue of being the only easy route out of the city towards Blessington — the fallback option when you can’t face another grind up Ballinascorney or Mount Seskin. Buckled after a hard ride yesterday? Crippled with a hangover? Recovering from yet another dose of Covid? The Embankment is your friend. During the winter when other roads are slick with frost, the N81 sees enough traffic to melt it off. The surface is uniformly good, with barely a pothole in sight. It’s sheltered from the prevailing westerly winds.

And, of course, it’s perfect for riding fixed gear — if you have any legs at all, you can storm up it in a single out-of-the-saddle effort, humming “The Ride of the Valkyries” to yourself as you go. I’ve crawled up Seskin on fixed and it’s not an experience I’d care to repeat. I can’t imagine making it over Ballinascorney on a single cog. But the Embankment gives easy access to the gentler roads of west Wicklow, and after a couple of bleak months riding around Kildare and north county Dublin, you’ll be very glad it’s there.

Wet road between tree-lined verges under slate grey sky
The top of the Embankment…as you can see, it’s all charm