Cycle camping in Victorian and Edwardian Ireland

Abstract

This essay provides an overview of the main developments in cycle camping in Ireland in the late Victorian and Edwardian period, documenting for the first time the main individuals and groups involved, describing cycle campers' activities when they went camping and discussing what attracted devotees to take up this relatively new pastime. Fin-de-siècle cycle camping emerged in Ireland, it should be noted, following a rapid development in cycling as a participant sport and health-giving pastime towards the end of the nineteenth century. As cycling technology developed in the nineteenth century and different types of cycle were superseded by improved models, Irish people gradually grew accustomed to the sight of numerous varieties of velocipedes, tricycles and bicycles, including pedal-less hobby horses that riders propelled by using their feet to push their machines along the ground, cycles that were built to be propelled on water, giant unicycles that featured as circus acts, as well as Ordinaries or so-called "Pennyfarthings", and tandems, "triplets" and even "quintuplet" machines. 1 The 1880s were years of particularly rapid technological change in the cycling industry. At the start of the decade, the Ordinary (solid-tyred, tall, accessible only to the young, athletic and male) dominated Irish cycling, while the comparatively cumbersome tricycle allowed women, and men who were older and more timid than their Ordinary-riding counterparts, to participate in the new pastime. In the decade's middle years, safety bicycles were developed, although most young male cyclists continued to ride Ordinaries as they were quicker than the safeties, whose solid tyres meant that they progressed more slowly than the high-wheeled machines; a smaller number of safety bicycles for women were also in evidence, but most Irish female cyclists persevered with riding tricycles. 2 It wasn't until after John Boyd Dunlop developed the pneumatic tyre in