Ireland: The Best of the Emerald Isle

Twelve nights around Ireland on roads voted the best in the country by local riders. Riders bring their own bike on the ferry, or hire one from London.

The trip starts in the Peak District or London with a welcome dinner, then the Holyhead ferry to Dublin and a night at Balbriggan on the coast. The east coast road runs north to Belfast, with an afternoon there and then the Titanic Quarter: the museum stands on the slipways where the ship was built, and the SS Nomadic alongside it was her tender and is the last White Star liner afloat anywhere in the world.

Newgrange follows, a passage tomb built around five thousand years ago, older than the pyramids, and engineered so that the rising sun reaches the chamber at the winter solstice. The Mourne coastal route comes next with mountains on one side and the Antrim coast on the other.

The Giant’s Causeway is next, where some forty thousand hexagonal basalt columns step down into the sea, formed by a lava flow cooling and cracking around sixty million years ago. Heritage sites, castles, haunted houses and Irish whiskey fill the rest, with Galway and the west beyond. The price is quoted per rider. Twelve nights covers both the north and the west without the dash that a shorter Irish tour requires, and the roads the operator has picked are not the ones a map would suggest, which is the whole value of riding it with people who live there.