An Irishman's Diary

THERE WERE six of us standing by the Mayo roadside, minding our own business, fascinating ourselves over our respective machines. The other lads were from England, from the southeast – Brighton, Eastbourne area, I think – save for one who was now married to a Donegal girl and living in Balbriggan, Co Dublin. His mates were over for a motorbike gallivant with him around Ireland.

All our bikes were big ones – big touring machines for the most part.

There were three BMW 1200 GSes (the best bikes in the world bar none, by the way), two of them owned by me and my biking pal Tony; a BMW F800S (not really a tourer and not my scene but our companion Noel swears by it and wouldn’t ride anything else), and some other machine that I can’t remember. The sixth, the focus of much attention, was a white, 24-year-old R80, a forerunner of the modern GS, stripped down to its skeletal minimum, an engine block about the same size as an old Ford tractor. It was the pride of its owner, a skinny, leather-clad middle-aged bloke sucking on a roll-up as he dispensed biker wisdom.

Behind us, two farmers, bemused but unconcerned at the clutch of middle-aged hooligans who had pulled over and were blocking their drive, chatted away as two adolescent sheepdogs scampered about an adjoining field, tumbling as they misjudged lunges at lambs, who remained unfazed.

So there we were, at the top of the Doo Lough pass enjoying the big machines, the sunshine and the chat when we were joined by it. Its arrival was announced by a watery putt-putt-putt sound, the sort small machines make when their exhaust is malfunctioning. Had it been heard by great musical humourist Gerard Hoffnung, he would have included it in his orchestra . . . somewhere between the woodwinds and percussion.

The putt-putting comes from a blue and white Honda 90 that looks every one of its 22 years on the road. For the uninitiated, a Honda 90 is to a BMW 1200 GS what a Penny Farthing is to the Tour de France. Motorbikers passing each other on the highway routinely gesture acknowledgment – a nod of the head, a twist of the wrist, a wiggle of a foot – that

sort of thing. The hard truth is, a Honda 90 would be ignored by riders of more worthy machines.

The putt-putt machine rider, a broad-shouldered fellow clad in a black padded biker jacket and wearing a helmet with incongruous go-faster stripes on it, dismounts and goes to the rear of the Honda 90. He opens a carrier box, a white plastic square home-made thing attached to the back seat and whose lid is fitted with a padlock fastened on by pop rivets. Strapped on to the passenger seat and held in place against this box is a green plastic petrol can, the sort one uses to refill lawnmowers.

The rider removes a crumpled sheet of paper and, slowly and deliberately, approaches the rest of us, all the time looking at the sheet of paper. He speaks in a low-key, measured way and with a very broad Wicklow accent.

“Do any of yous know the clap bridge?” he asks, not looking up but continuing to study the sheet of paper.

“Yeah,” I say. “You mean the Clapper Bridge?” “Yeaaaaah,” he says, “thaddabeit alright. The Clapper Bridge. Do yous know it?” We are, it transpires, in the company of Mark Wheatley, keen entrant in the 2011 Boyne Riders Photographic Rally (irishphotorally.com).

Participants must ride their bikes to 24 listed locations throughout Ireland and prove they were there by taking a photograph. Mark is searching for location No 20 – the Clapper Bridge in Co Mayo. It is an unusual stone and pillar footbridge beside a ford through the Bunleemshough River at Killeen, near Louisburgh, built by Protestant missionaries in the mid-19th century.

It’s only a couple of miles from where we are standing and it is not until I am half way through giving Mark directions, that I engage him fully in conversation. It emerges from Mark, in an entirely matter-of-fact way, that he has just ridden his 1989 putt-putt machine from Old Head – not Mayo’s Old Head, which is a few miles beyond Louisburgh, but Old Head in Kinsale, via Portmagee in Co Kerry.

That’s a journey of some 546 kilometres.

Mark has a lost schoolboy insouciance about him; he seems like the sort of fellow who strikes out on a journey and then, when he has arrived, is slightly mystified to find himself where he is.

“Yeaaaaah,” he says studying the list, “I done five or six on the list now but I’ve more to do and I haven’t even started in Northern Ireland yet.” It is now about 6.30 in the evening and we lead Mark to the Clapper Bridge. He wheels the Honda 90 onto the elevated flagstones that are the walkway over the ford. The machine stand there, bereft of rider and looking, well, utterly daft, as Mark duly takes his photo.

And where to now? I ask.

“Oh, home tonight. Back to Roundwood,” he says.

Roundwood? Roundwood in Wicklow? “Yeaaaah,” says Mark, “Roundwood. That’s home. But I work in Bray.” And that’ll take how long? I ask.

“ ’Bout five or six hour, I suppose. I can only get her up to 50-mile-an-hour so I won’t be done for speeding,” he says with a grin.

Days later, I track down Mark’s cheerfully tolerant wife, Catherine, at their home in Roundwood. “That yoke is the bane of my life,” she says of the Honda 90. “He left here at 3am on Saturday for Mullingar [where he photographed his plucky machine at the De Profundis Stone].” From Mullingar, he struck out for Kinsale, then Mayo (via Portmagee) and the Clapper Bridge, and then home to Wicklow. That’s a round trip of approximately 1,270km.

One thousand, two hundred and seventy kilometres . . . on a Honda 90 doing a max of 50 over 44 hours, give or take.

“It’s a bit mad,” is Catherine’s understated response. “He thinks it’s quite normal. He got home at 10.50 [pm on Sunday]. He didn’t know it was Father’s Day,” she added laughing.

Mark has until November 17th to complete the rally, including the six locations in Ulster. So between now and then, if you spot a slightly rickety but very determined blue and white Honda 90 putt-putting towards the roofless church at the entrance to the Poisoned Glen in Dunlewy, Co Donegal, that’ll be our Mark, a burgeoning legend of Irish motorbiking.

Go Mark Wheatley! Go!