29th September - The missing Day

I don’t know how people blog professionals. I do this to keep friends and family updated with what is going on so they know not to worry, it also has turned into a bit of a diary to help me remember the trips. Just writing the small number of words that I do takes a lot of time, just setting up and sorting photos. Difficult to do when staying with friends. So, this a day that I just realized I missed.

The sky looked OK and I was over for riding, so David plotted a route to head north of Dublin to take me on a tour of where he grew up. You can see the track we took going North West of Dublin on the map. We passed the house he grew up in, that was quite remote and opposite a farm, and headed to Bective Abbey which was David's playground when he was a kid.





A very attractive ruined Abby.






A very inspirational childhood playground.

By comparison, my childhood playground was an abandoned WW II Naval Defence Gun Emplacement in Harwich where I played with Cordite that used to get washed up on the beach from a WW II Cordite Barge that sank.  I am amazed I still have both hands and all my fingers.

Believe it or not, I used to sunbathe on the roof of that tower. There are no stairs up to the roof, you have to climb........... I have no idea when my fear glands developed, but I an't going up there now!

After stopping off for a snack we headed back to Bray. The weather looked like it would hold so we decided to take the long way back through the Wicklow Mountains, the area we had ridden through the day before, but this time via the Glencree Road where there is Ireland's only German war cemetery. 

The cemetery contains 134 graves of mainly Luftwaffe (Air Force) and Kriegsmarine (Navy) World War II personnel.  Many of those interred within washed up on the country’s beaches or crashed their aircraft overhead.

Among the buried soldiers from World War II, 53 are identified remains and 28 are unknown. There are also the graves of 46 civilian detainees who were being shipped to Canada for internment when their ship, the S.S. Arandora Star, was torpedoed by a German U-Boat in July 1940, as well as the graves of six people the British held as prisoners of war during the First World War.

Görtz, an Abwehr agent (German Secret Service), is buried here.  He parachuted into County Meath in 1940 as part of Operation Mainau. He established contact with “V-Held” aka Seamus “Jim” O’Donovan of the IRA. He was eventually arrested after evading the authorities for 18 months, along with IRA member Pearse Paul Kelly at Görtz’s safe house in Dublin in November 1941.

The Cemetary is set in an old quarry in a remote spot.   Any distraction created by passing cars is drowned out by the cascading river.  

We then set off to Bray where we had been told that there was a small classic car show being held on the beach.    Bray Head is in the distance.  

 It is on Bray Head, that following a wildfire that removed all of the undergrowth, that they discovered stones laid out to spell Eire, a bit like a Made in China Lable.    No, this is not proof that the World was made by Aliens that forgot to remove all of the country labels, apparently, it was there to let the WW II German bombers know that they had gone too far.

Question is, why did we not cover the coast of England with misleading signs to confuse the Germans.

After a refreshing coke in one of my favourite Bray Pubs, the Porterhouse, except it was no longer the Porterhouse and in the middle of a makeover that was sort of making it look like an Irish Pub should be, in the eyes of London tourist, if the pub was actually in London (most confusing, needless and disappointing), we headed off.

So ends the missing day.