Hat tip to MDonaldson → — this is indeed a great piece about the Meat Puppets and growing up in Phoenix, AZ.
Following the link trail a little further — a fat stash of Meat Puppets soundboards and other live recordings.
Ballinascorney (2.9km, 191m, 6.3%)
Ballinascorney is a solid climb but it doesn’t inspire genuine love in me. The lower section is nice, winding upwards on a smoothly paved, tree-lined road, but it’s also very narrow, and the quarry at the top of the hill means that you often find yourself being monstered by impatient gravel truck drivers. Further up the road opens out but the surface is harsher and you’re more exposed to the wind.
Nonetheless, I ride it dozens of times every year, and I’m often battling it out for the Local Legend on the Strava segment because it’s the best way out of the city towards the south-west. The Embankment (N81) will take you to many of the same places but traffic is far heavier and there’s no hard shoulder despite it being an N-road. Ballinascorney gives you access to the picturesque roads behind Bohernabreena reservoir, and to essential climbs like the Firing Range and McDonagh’s Lane. It’s usually salted in the winter and carries enough traffic for any frost to melt off quickly so it’s often usable when other mountain roads aren’t.
The road starts climbing as you pass the Bohernabreena Reservoir car park and if you’re lucky enough not to have any cars for company the first kilometer or so is very pleasant. It briefly hits 14% but the road is so smooth that you’d barely notice it. There’s a respite section as you pass the foot-golf course on the left before the road kicks up again and the surface turns into giant sandpaper. The next half-kilometer is the meat of the climb, a steady 9% gradient. The gradient eases off as you swing left and you’d like to shift up but this is usually the moment when you discover where the wind has been hiding, and you crawl the remaining 500m to the top.
I wish you the very best of luck in stealing Nico Roche’s KOM on this segment.
Ballinascorney comes into its own as a descent. At the crest of the hill you get a brief glimpse of the city spread out below you* as you get into full aero tuck for the ski-slope first half. The lower half is more sinuous and narrow but the curves are still loose enough that you can rip through them faster than cars can drive them. After the shank over the bridge at the bottom of the descent proper the road continues gently downhill all the way back to Rathfarnham and you often have a tailwind into the bargain — you may have been on your hands and knees before then but you’ll feel like a king, big ringing it all the way home.
*Like a patient etherized upon a table.
First Love
There’s something concentrated, claustrophobic, about Gwendoline Riley’s First Love, such that it comes as a relief that the book is only 167 pages long. The prospect of spending more time in the company of bullying, self-pitying Edwyn feels intolerable, the reader just as trapped as Riley’s protagonist, Neve. The liberal use of italics for emphasis in the dialogue should feel heavy-handed but Riley’s pitch is perfect, capturing the leaden sarcasm and sullen aggression of everyday speech. Her acerbic observation of modern British manners recalls Rachel Cusk’s trilogy, Transit in particular, but with immediacy and intensity in place of Cusk’s glassy distance.
Neve’s relationships with her parents seem to foreshadow those in Riley’s subsequent novel, My Phantoms, as though she realised while writing First Love that there was rich material there that couldn’t be explored thoroughly without losing the essential focus on the central relationship between Neve and Edwyn, unbalancing a very tight novel. Which is not to say that Riley repeats herself — the shift in focus develops the father beyond the thumbnail sketch in First Love, and if Neve’s mother is memorable, Hen in My Phantoms is indelible, one of the great comic monsters of recent years, needy, self-regarding, oblivious. What unites Riley’s characters is their uncertainty about what is normal, what one can reasonably expect of other people, or of life. It feels a very modern anxiety.
Piperstown Road (6km, 351m, 5.6%)
Piperstown Road is one of my favourite local climbs. Once you’re past Bohernabreena village, the road is very quiet — to see more than a couple of cars along the way up would be unusual. The gradients vary constantly with the steepest ramps hitting 15 and 16%, but the road surface on the upper stretches is billiard table–smooth and you’ll feel like you have an extra couple of gears.
The road starts to rise as soon as you turn off the R114 onto Bohernabreena Road but the fun doesn’t really begin until you pass the church on the right side of the road — a short ramp touching 15%, just to wake you up. The houses lining the side of the road thin quickly as you head up, giving views of the valley to the left.
At 3.5km the road descends briefly, then shanks left and right over a small stone bridge to deliver you straight into the next steep section. You’d like to be able to carry pace into it, but the kink in the road is tight enough to make that difficult. From the bridge on, you’re into the mountains proper, open bogland to your right, pine plantations on the left, and the scars left by a dozen burnt-out cars along the roadway.
Another short drop brings you to the final grind to the top, the junction with Military Road. From there, turn right to continue towards Sally Gap, turn left to drop back down into the city.
Piperstown also makes a very nice descent but during the winter it’s so lightly trafficked that there is often a sheen of moss on the surface of the road that can be treacherous if it’s wet (and it will be). Approach with caution.
Piperstown — Glencullen (37km, 563m)
Categorised Climbs: Piperstown Road
Let’s get the ball rolling with something very basic. This is a route I ride mostly in the winter and early spring: the roads are relatively sheltered from the wind, and it packs in a decent amount of climbing for a ride that takes less than two hours. If you’re desperate for a coffee stop (or a pint), Johnnie Fox’s will be happy to take your money.
Head out through Old Bawn on the R114, a road which will soon become tediously familiar. It’s a wide, open drag that offers no respite from the prevailing westerlies but it’s direct and it has the signal virtue of not being the bloody N81.
After the crossroads at Old Bawn, turn left onto the L7114 and follow the road for 6km through Bohernabreena village and up to the Featherbeds. At the T-junction, go left on Military Road to drop down to the Viewing Point, then sharp right onto Cruagh Road.
Take the right turn onto Pine Forest Road and continue past O’Connell’s Rock to the Glencullen crossroads. Turn left onto Red House Road and continue down Burrow Road to join the R117 near Stepaside. From there it’s suburban roads through Dundrum and Terenure to finish.
Variation: turn right after Bohernabreena and follow the road through Glenasmole to join Upper Cunard Road. Continue to the T-junction at Military Road, and turn left to rejoin the original route.
Raison d’Être
In the Tour de France and other professional bike races, the major ascents along the route are assigned to categories, carrying points towards the King of the Mountains prize. According to legend, these categories are based on the gearing of the Citroën 2CV. Minor ramps that the 2CV could roar over in fourth gear were assigned to Category 4, and so on up to Category 1 for long, steep climbs that the car could barely crawl up in first gear. Climbs that defeated the humble deux chevaux entirely, towering eminences such Alpe d’Huez or Mont Ventoux, were declared beyond categorisation: hors catégorie, or HC. In Spanish races, these climbs are dubbed Especial. The Italians, demonstrating an insouciance befitting the nation that gave us Fausto Coppi, do not acknowledge the concept — even leg-breaking monsters like the Stelvio or the Mortirolo rate only Category 1.
None of the climbs in the Dublin and Wicklow mountains come close to HC status — the longest might be a thirty-minute effort, and the gradients are usually forgiving. But I believe that the overall cycling experience is HC. Few European capitals are blessed with such a wealth of quiet roads and beautiful views so close at hand. Residents of central Paris or London can cycle for hours without escaping the suburbs; in half an hour I can be high above the city, with only the calls of the birds and the creak of the bicycle in my ears. This blog will be a guide to the pleasures of cycling in Dublin and Wicklow, my favourite routes, unsung back roads, the climbs worth seeking out.
Other pleasures in life can be HC. Marquee Moon, Rock Bottom and Spirit of Eden. Sonic Youth at the Top Hat in 1991. Antonioni’s alienation trilogy. J G Ballard and Joan Didion. The London Review of Books. Slate and shell Go stones on a kaya board. A thick, oily shot of espresso, a well-mixed negroni, 3 Fonteinen Oude Geuze. These too will feature.