THe wild atlantic way

1,200km of the legendary route

Last July, I embarked on a 1,200km journey along the west coast of Ireland. Whatever route you may choose, the landscape is varied and breathtaking. I used a mix of the Eurovelo 1 and the gpx file found on this blog. You could also follow the many Wild Atlantic Way signs, but bear in mind that the itinerary was designed for cars, so you will find yourself on busy roads.

This trip had been a dream of mine for a few years, and I was very excited to finally see for myself what all the fuss was about. The plan was simple: starting from Sligo, I would spend a week cycling ‘normal people distances’ with a friend, aiming for about 70km a day, camping in a big tent, stopping in B&Bs if we felt like it. This is 'the holiday'. Then, I would embark on a solo journey all the way to the south coast, cycling almost non-stop and sleeping just a few hours a night in my bivvy bag: 'the ultra’. The aim was to prepare for an upcoming ultra-endurance cycling event and most importantly, to prove to myself that I could cycle 250km a day several days in a row.

The holiday 

The first week was a tale of shortcuts and time management. No later than on the train ride from Dublin to Sligo, we decided to hop off at Coolaney, one station early, to save a few kilometres.

We cycled off in the pouring rain and decided to set up camp 18km later by the Ladies Brae picnic area, where we were soon swarmed by midges. 

If you have never encountered midges, here’s a little picture for you. Midges are tiny flies that bite. Each bite can be felt but is relatively harmless on its own. However, a single bite is unlikely. Instead, a small group of midges will form around you. The small group will turn into a dense cloud that will obstruct your breathing, your sight, and most importantly, your sanity. One midge goes up your nose while another crashes into your pupil and a further 20 land on your hands, each leaving a little mark. The main reaction midges provoke in me is intense stress due to sensory overload.

Was this going to be our summer holiday? Eating dinner while speed walking in the rain and praying for high winds to deter little flies?

Our first full day of cycling had a clear destination: Healy’s Bar in Ballycastle, which according to a Komoot highlight, welcomes campers for free. 

We cycled through rain most of the day, admiring a landscape strongly reminiscent of Scotland. Peat bogs have long been used as a source of fuel and we saw people churning and cutting turf by the roadside about everywhere we went. While exploiting private bog land for personal use is still permitted, the sale of turf has been illegal since 2022. Judging by the number of houses that have an open shed overflowing with the stuff and the likelihood that all of those house owners also own a bit of boggy land, the trade is still going strong.

On the third day, I woke up in the pub garden in extreme pain from a UTI that I had desperately been trying to flush out for a few days. Why am I sharing this information? Because bikepacking is not always glamorous. Many mundane things become complicated when you live like a nomad: planning for food, water, pharmacies… Managing small obstacles can be a big part of bikepacking.

After about five phone calls, I got a medical appointment in Glenamoy, 27km away, that same afternoon. It was not on our planned route but it could serve as a shortcut. We battled some disgusting headwind on our way there. Between my friend’s fatigue creeping in and my endless roadside comfort stops, we took three hours to cover quite a short distance. When we finally arrived at the surgery, the secretary immediately showed me to the water fountain and the loo (a sure sign that she had had first hand experience of the woes of a UTI). The doctor took me in two hours before my appointment time and soon sent me on my way with antibiotics. I felt so relieved. I did not have to be brave anymore, I could just take it easy and wait for the medicine to kick in. 

I felt guilt, because my friend had wasted an entire morning of his one-week holiday, but I told myself that if the roles were reversed, I would feel compassion towards him, not annoyance over something that is beyond his control. We set off feeling lighter but very hungry and devoured some mediocre chips in Bangor Erris, which tasted delicious to our tired bodies.

My friend tried to reply to the cashier’s ‘Hi, how are you’ by telling her how he was and she looked at him in dismay. Three days in, we had understood that the customary greeting invites no response, but the tone people use is so engaging that we had to make a real effort not to answer.

More boggy landscape awaited us that afternoon, but with a view of the sea this time. We camped in a field and ate dinner in the tent to avoid a combination of light rain and midges.

Having reached the middle of our trip, we treated ourselves to a short day in a B&B in Liscarney. I cannot recommend Moher House highly enough. The room was not big but felt like extreme luxury after our rain-soaked nights, and the homemade welcome scones instantly won me over.

Breakfast was delicious if you ignore the way the Irish cook tomatoes, i.e. the same way Brits do. In my humble opinion, it is quite simple really: either cook the blasted tomato until it melts in the mouth, or just give it to me raw and juicy to bite into. I do not wish to eat a lukewarm, slightly browned and slightly mushy tasteless tomato. I spent over ten years in the UK thinking people had made a simple undercooking mistake with my tomatoes every time they landed on my plate before realising the horror is intentional.

When we set off after our night of respite, the wind was probably with us given that we moved at a good pace, but it was very chaotic, as if it were coming from every single direction at the same time. I felt like a human tornado, subject to a constant twirling force while gliding forward.

We left County Mayo to enter Galway, where we passed some lovely bays, including the bay of Leenaun, with a cemetery directly overlooking the water, standing at the windiest point, facing a dramatic and grandiose landscape. ‘Rest in peace’ takes its true meaning here.

We then crossed a bog that has left a strong impression on me. Pretty much every photo we had taken thus far could be mistaken for the Scottish bog. This time was different. Between Clifden and Toombeola, we were cycling across a plateau surrounded by low mountains and the landscape was very rocky. We got to fully appreciate the beauty of the view as we were blessed by a strong tailwind.

I spotted an unkept path leading to a large boulder behind which we could pitch the tent. We hesitated; the spot was nice enough, but would we find an even better one later on? My years of wild camping have taught me to settle for nice camping spots without looking for the perfect one. You never know what the landscape will be like in the next 10km, and it is very disheartening to think back at a perfectly nice spot you left behind when you are struggling to find a new one and longing for well-earned rest.

We feasted on a mix of instant pasta of varying flavours and were quite content, sitting on a flat rock overlooking a small lough (the English spelling for Irish lochs).

My wild camping hygiene routine has been the same ever since I started touring in 2017. I gather water from the nearby stream or lake and I give myself a sponge bath. If I have no access to water, I use 500ml from my bottles to clean ‘the important bits’. When I ride ultras, my streamlined routine involves wet wipes. This trip was supposed to be the leisurely sponge bath type, but it had been so rainy, cold or midgy that day five was my first camping spongebath since we started.

The following morning, we got up at 7.30a.m. and only set off at around 9.30a.m. We did not do anything special, we just took our time to have breakfast. I never take two hours between the moment I open my eyes and the moment I leave my house, but somehow when I camp, that is quite common. Granted, you have to dismantle your bed, your house, your kitchen… but I think the main reason I linger is that I have the time. I have very few needs and no to-do list, so I do not ‘take the time’; instead, time takes me. It stretches and exists around me without bothering me. I notice the time on my watch, I do not keep it. 

We had taken so many shortcuts to make sure that our last days would be stress-free and that we would not have to ‘make distance’ that we ended up slightly too close to Galway, where my friend’s journey was to end, with a day to spare. We took advantage of this newfound time to look around Carraroe, a touristy town according to someone on Booking.com; in reality, a bunch of houses by the main road and five theoretical places where we could have had lunch, only one of which was open.

The cafe in question, Bia Blasta, had friendly staff who greeted us in Irish, the first time since the start of our trip. Locals spoke Irish between them. I naively thought that Irish was mostly being re-learnt through school and not really spoken in households, like Breton in France, but I am glad I was wrong. 

We cycled south to visit a coral beach where the sand is made up of dried ​maërl, a local seaweed, giving the impression of broken up coral. I do not like complaining about the weather. Complaining about things beyond my control only makes me bitter, it does not help me in any way. Nonetheless, a few extra degrees and some sunshine would have been nice. It would have given us a chance to sit on the beach and just enjoy the moment. Instead, we had to pace around and layer up. Regardless, the water was beautiful and the coral sand entertaining. 

Our last camp out was just after Ireland’s largest wind farm, Oweninny. The moors did not offer many places that were sheltered or hidden from the road, but we found a sort of dip by the roadside, what I suspect used to be a quarry, now long overgrown. 

When we arrived in Galway the next day, I had a huge peak of stress on the crowded main street. When I cycle from village to village and camp in remote places, I feel relaxed and peaceful, more so than when I am at home. I have never liked crowds, but the brutal transition from an empty bog to a buzzing main street gets to me every time. I feel like I am suffocating and I cannot hear my own thoughts.

The ultra

Before embarking on my solo journey, I shed all non-essential kit: the tent, my flip flops, the stove and my second pair of bibs. 

I got on my bike at 6.30a.m. and headed off to follow a slightly modified version of the Wild Atlantic Way that a friend had shared with me, instead of following the Eurovelo 1 as we had been doing so far. Less than an hour in, I started crying; wondering what I was doing; whether I liked ultra; why I was here. Recently, I had been saying more and more that I did not like ultra. Why continue?

I rang a friend who proposed that I just 'try to give it one day’ then decide. That was the wise option but not what I wanted at that moment. I had been wanting to ride the Wild Atlantic Way ever since 2021 when I crossed Ireland north to south through the middle and locals questioned why I was not cycling the coast instead. Yet at that point, I did not care. I wanted to go home and text the race organiser of my next event that I would not be taking the start line. 

I texted my thoughts to another friend who gave me quite a different reply: ‘You know yourself by now. If you are convinced the best option for you is to go home, then just do that’. It was all decided then. I opened my train app and I was about to press ‘buy’ on a ticket to Dublin when I turned off my screen, got on the bike and rode off without thinking back. Just like that, when I was happy to stop and go home, I liberated myself from the sense of duty and pressure I had been feeling. I did not need to hear ‘You’re a beast, you can do this’. Instead, I needed to be told that nothing bad would happen if I stopped. I decided to ride out the day, and that it did not matter if I covered just 50km. In the end, I cycled 209km before 6p.m.

The weather was now beautiful and so was the route through Burren National Park, where I cycled alongside galloping wild horses. In the afternoon, I mostly followed the main road as indicated by the Wild Atltantic Way signs, typically the kind of road a Eurovelo route would avoid. I decided to prioritise the Eurovelo 1 route from then on.

By the time I reached Tarbert, the weather had turned and I found myself in light drizzle. My minimalist shelter, my bivvy bag, does not do well in the rain, so I decided to ask a local for a place to pitch, hoping they may have a covered shed I could share with some hay or turf.

I stopped a couple walking towards me and they soon invited me not only to pitch the tent in their garden, but also to use their spare room, enjoy a fluffy dressing gown, and watch the football with them while I ate my dinner. This is the sort of thing I would not be able to do during a self-supported ultra-endurance event. Accepting a helping hand would get me disqualified.

My hosts reminded me what I like about bikepacking: meeting people and encountering the unexpected. I do not know whether I will ever actually develop a taste for mindless exhaustion (my choice of words says something about my mindset). 

That night, I decided to just enjoy my time, sleep as much as I liked, cycle a lot but allow myself as much off time as I wished. You do not run a marathon to train for a marathon. I knew that, yet I had made gruelling plans for myself.

The following days were long, between 150km and 200km, but guided by my stamina and morale instead of by my fear of failing. Out of the following three nights, I spent two in a family’s spare room, sharing my favourite snacks with them as a meagre thank you for their immediate hospitality. I spent the other night plagued by midges, eating a slice of cold pizza in my bivvy bag, the not-so-waterproof fabric sticking to the back of my head, pondering over my life decisions.

What I find most fascinating is that my hosts in Ireland have not been through-hikers or bikepackers, just retirees with a big heart. They did not necessarily understand what I was doing or why I was doing it, but they were happy to support me. No wonder I return from every cycling trip with more faith in humanity.

I rode around a peninsula a day: Dingle, Kerry and Beara. The first two were beautiful but very touristy. It felt like the numerous roadside signs were trying to squeeze money out of me every other kilometre: ‘the original Irish Famine cottage’; ‘beehive huts’; ‘the original beehive huts’; ‘stone circle’; and ‘pet a lamb’; each available from a few euros.

I have nothing against locals wanting to make money. What I disliked was the brutal reminder that I was in an extremely touristy area and that I, myself, was a tourist. When I cycle tour, I think of myself as different from most tourists: I experience the landscape more intensely by cycling all day, I discover the land by camping, and I meet lots of people. Because I tour to experience freedom and isolated places, I do not like to be reminded that in the end, I am just another tourist.

Before reaching Dingle, I climbed Connor Pass, slowly but surely. Once again, I had let someone’s opinions about a climb get into my head. My previous host had said it was a very difficult climb, even in a car. I made sure I had a snack before the climb and started my ascent constantly wondering when the tough bit would appear, but it never did. I am not a fast climber but I am a patient one. I can climb anything without killing myself as long as I can let my legs spin out. I should have known better than to let someone intimidate me. Even steep climbs on ultra-endurance events do not scare me once I am there, because guess what, you can get off your bike and walk them if you need to.

Descending from Connor Pass into Dingle turned out to be a different story. The crosswind was so strong that I had to dismount and walk down the first hairpin bend to avoid being thrown to the ground.

The ring of Kerry is famous for a reason. Between lush green landscapes and sharp cliffs, it has plenty to offer. At the Western end of the ring lies Cúm an Easpaig, a steep climb that I could have shortcut, but I reminded myself of my Connor Pass experience. With a length of 4km overall with 1.2km over 10% and no passing places, my opportunities to zig-zag from one side of the road to another were limited, so my quads took a beating. I started zig-zagging on climbs years ago out of convenience, since it feels like adding one or two easier gears to your bike, but now I do it out of habit. Why push my thighs when I could just have an easier time?

The ring of Beara had some surprises in stock for me. By far the most up and down bit of the coast so far, it also came to be my favourite one. Alternating between my absolute lowest gear and braking before narrow blind corners, I felt grateful that I did not have this sort of elevation profile on the day I almost gave up, as it could have pushed me over the edge. I bumped into a road cyclist catching his breath mid-climb. ‘Some steep hills!’ I shouted. He replied ‘And plenty of them!’, which indicated that the rest of the day would not be any easier. 

I was about to take on another hill, daydreaming about kittens, and just like that, I spotted five kittens on the other side of a fence. I hesitated. It would be good to get the hill over with. Then I reminded myself that I had decided to have fun, so I stopped and leaned my bike against a wall. A man came out from behind a parked car and started walking towards me. It was hard to estimate his age; he could have been 50 to 70 years old. He had the skin of someone who does not believe in sunscreen and the teeth of someone who does not see a dentist very often. He was wearing the kind of hat you only see in cartoons, of a nondescript shape, a type I had never seen before, and that sat diagonally across the top of his skull. 

‘Hi there, I am just stopping to have a look at your kittens!’ He smiled at me. As he bent down, I spotted a brown kitten I had not seen before, blending in with the colour of dirt. He seemed happy to be stroked by his owner so I tried my luck as well. As I extended my hand towards him, he recoiled and ran away. The man looked at me and in a deep, hoarse voice with an accent I had not heard so far, he said: ‘He knooooows you’re strange’.

After a brief cycle inland the next day, I took a train from Mallow to Dublin to make my way home. I was very tired at that point, but I was pleased with my trip and my decisions. Who knows whether I will persevere in ultra-endurance racing, but I am certainly not about to stop discovering the world by cycling and camping.