Thank you, Anthony.
Looking at this thread and others, what has become obvious to me is that my knowledge of the island of Ireland is pretty poor. Not so much the shape of the place in general, where Dublin and Belfast are, the area designated ‘Northern Ireland’ or the changeable weather or near enough what the scenery looks like. It’s more where the counties are in relation to each other and (more importantly perhaps) where all the smaller towns like, Wexford, Cork, Bantry (though I knew that has a bay), Killarney, Galway, Westport and Sligo are situated. Laziness on my part, but probably more down to where I live than anything else. To get to Ireland, Wales or Scotland from central London is a full day’s schlep, sometimes on not the most exciting of roads. Cornwall, the same. In a little over two hours I can be trundling under the Channel, well on the way to Calais, France and the rest of mainland Europe. In short, I didn’t ‘need’ to go to anywhere else in the British Isles, when the whole of Germany was little more than a day away at most.
It wasn’t until last September that I spent any time at all in Scotland. Yes, I trundled along the NC 500 in a motorhome but why not? It is why the tourist board made the route, as a simple (basic) snapshot of what Scotland has to offer. The islands I missed completely; that doesn’t matter, I know they are there and that they won’t go away in my lifetime. Wales, I don’t think I have ever been to on a motorcycle and only ever to watch rugby. Ireland, the same. I have seen more of Italy, than I have of the ‘home countries’ that make up four of the six nations. People can knock threads like this and say, “It’s all been done to death”. Yes, it very probably has by you, but not by everyone else. Yes, there is a ton of information available on the internet, just as there is about Australia, Brazil, Kazakstan and no doubt the 53 moons of Jupiter, too. But, it’s not until I took the trouble to look for myself that I started to see it all properly and start to understand what is on offer. Will I ever see it all? No, not in what remains of my lifetime, so there is no danger at all of me ‘doing it to death’. Has it given me (and I hope others) some inspiration to at least fill some significant gap in my understanding as to what lies not so very far away, if I simply join the A5 or A1 instead of the M20? Yes.
My thanks to all that have contributed, to the chat I had with ChasMill yesterday evening and the other offers to assist that I have received. Hopefully, when I make an effort, I can go to see some of it for myself..... and yes, I’ll still somehow still miss out the ‘best bit’, inevitably. Someone always does.