RAGLEY REVIVAL

WORDS AND PICTURES BY BARNEY MARSH

BARNEY HEADS TO A SOMEWHAT SOGGY NORTHERN IRELAND TO INVESTIGATE A HARDTAIL BRAND IN RESURGENCE.

At times, Northern Ireland reminds me – quite a lot – of parts of America. It’s not about ten-gallon hats, or a propensity for enormous pickup trucks – although the region probably has its share, but once you get out of the urban sprawls, and motorways with insane numbers of lanes (America again), it’s the way the space is used. Whether it’s true in actuality or not, there’s a feeling that there has always been plenty of room to go around. Aeons past, settlers didn’t feel the need to bunch up. There’s an air of sprawling, of stretching, of mankind’s presence extending longer, thinner tendrils here than in other parts of the UK. As you travel through Northern Ireland, you get a sense that villages start more gradually, urbanisation increases in density more slowly, and then you reach a nebulous centre before leaving the buildings languidly behind, as if they’re reluctant to let you go.

Where am I?

I’m sitting pondering this and other unanswerables as I’m being ferried through the countryside, peering through the raindrops on the windscreen as the world opens up like a particularly soggy flower. And almost before I have a chance to draw breath, I’m in a trail centre. I’m carving an impossibly fun section of steep, wooded singletrack; very, very fast, flowing sinewy lines of grey and white in an otherwise dank forest, with steep berms that catapult me into direction changes without a thought; stepdowns which seem small until I’m on top of them, at which point they’re anything but. Luckily, the speed at which I’m hurtling prevents any brake-induced catastrophes – I simply can’t slow down fast enough – and so I rocket on through, whooping with delight at the thing I’ve just cleaned. And I make a mental note to ride it faster next time, which is happily something I proceed to do immediately as I circle around for another go on my spanking new loaner Ragley Bigwig.