A Book Review

To say that we're using Towpath Tours by John Dunne as a guide for these trips is to undersell it. It was actually the inspiration to get out and just do it.

I travelled the majority of the canal by narrowboat on a couple of occasions nearly twenty years ago, and while even then the canal was easily navigable by boat, it was obvious that the towpaths were not. Bramble choked and sporadically pocked with bogholes of indeterminate depth after decades of neglect, any cyclist would have had a hard time of it.

I was therefore delighted and intrigued when I stumbled across Towpath Tours and read that, for the most part, the whole canal could be traversed by bike. In addition to the Grand Canal, coverage is also provided for the Royal Canal, the River Barrow, the Boyne Navigation, The Shannon-Erne Waterway, the River Lagan, and the Newry Canal. That's a lot of cycling.

Mr Dunne's inclusion of local history, geography and legend saves this book from becoming a dry instruction manual, and it's a good read in its own right. The problem, if any, is that some of the instructions, and particularly the maps, could be more detailed. Careful and repeated reading of the text is required to ascertain the crossing points from bank-to-bank, and better maps (including an indication of the route to travel) would have remedied this problem. In any event, you wouldn't want to undertake the trip without additional maps, and the Discovery Series 1:50,000 maps from the Ordnance Survey of Ireland are readily available in outdoor shops and even in larger newsagents. For the Grand Canal you'll need sheets (heading in a westerly direction) 50, 49, 48. The last 10K of the canal skims inconveniently across the corner of sheet 47 before straggling onto to sheet 53, but it's not worth buying these two unless you're a real perfectionist.

As Waldorf mentioned, the book is sadly out of print, so if you can get a copy at a reasonable price, snap it up. As for what a reasonable price might be, just remember that you could get quite literally years of enjoyment out of it.