Cycle Paths, Moone High Cross and Poor Road Signage

Yesterday's Sunday cycle took me to the area around Moone, via a more roundabout but pleasant traffic-free route up Brewel Hill, then through Colbinstown and Timolin. I returned home via Ballitore, Crookstown and Narraghmore Bog, a 30-mile round trip. I wanted to see the infamous Timolin-Moone cycle paths on the R448. As per usual, the path layout includes those ubiquitous grass verges. I'm not sure whether this feature is purely functional to reduce water run-off onto the carriageways or for growing wildflowers in the grass keep to the environmental lobby happy. I dropped in to see the High Cross of Moone. I hadn't been there for a few years. The cross has been protected by a corrugated-Perspex-roofed canopy for over 15 years. Such constructions help to protect carvings on heritage stonework from being eroded by the elements. Perhaps their use could be more widespread, as inevitably more detail will be lost from stonework over the coming centuries?

Unusually, I met lots of drivers on the narrow L-roads I normally travel on. Many of these are only the width of a car. It wasn't until a woman stopped her car and asked me for directions, while I was taking a cycling break at a bridge on one of these L-roads that branches off the Timolin-Baltinglass road, that I realised what was happening: Blockades on the M9 had forced drivers to resort to their sat-navs to find alternative routes. The woman was on her way to Dublin and the sat-nav had sent her down this boreen. Unfortunately, the lack of signage on many minor junctions, which is pretty typical in Kildare and Wicklow and presumably most other counties, meant that she was lost and had to resort to technology. Coupled with the obscuring of signs because landowners neglect to cut back vegetation, drivers who aren't familiar with roads must find it difficult. As a 9-year-old child, I was given the job of "navigator" by my father when we got lost on a Sunday drive near Avoca and I noticed we had taken a wrong turn on the journey home. My father told me to go to John Joe Dowling's newsagent and buy a Sheet 16 map of Kildare Wicklow to use for navigation (he was a navigation officer in the LDF during the Emergency, or perhaps later in the 50s as member of the FCA). From then on I kept track of our progress on drives, making sure we didn't get lost. We always had paper road maps in the car—something that people may no longer do, relying on technology to get them to where they want to go.

New Moone-Timolin cycle lanes. © Eugene Brennan

Moone High Cross. © Eugene Brennan

Carving detail on Moone High Cross. © Eugene Brennan

Carving detail on Moone High Cross. © Eugene Brennan