Cycle camping in Victorian and Edwardian Ireland

ABSTRACT

One of the most important aspects of cycling’s impact on Ireland in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods is that it made recreational trips to the countryside easier for the urban middle class and better-off workers who could afford to buy bicycles. As this article shows, many Irish and other cyclists in this period combined their love of cycling and the countryside with camping trips. Cycle camping appealed to enthusiasts for a number of reasons, including its relative cheapness, the welcome temporary release that it brought from conventional urban modes of living, and the perceived mental and physical health benefits that it brought. A close examination of the activities and mindset of cycle campers in Ireland reveals that they had much in common with their contemporaries, the “muscular Christian” enthusiasts for sports.

KEYWORDS:

• Cycling
• camping
• bicycles
• Richard James Mecredy
• Thomas Hiram Holding

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Griffin, “Early History of Cycling.”

2. Griffin, Cycling, 18–9, 29–32, 53–4, 103–5.

3. Ibid., 114–7.

4. Daily Express, July 17 1888.

5. Totnes Weekly Times, June 9 1888.

6. For the early history of cycling tourism in Ireland, see Griffin, “Bad Roads” and “The Tourist Gaze.”

7. Freeman’s Journal, August 3 1886; and Mecredy, Tour to Connemara.

8. Mecredy, Through the North.

9. Totnes Weekly Times, 9 June 1888.

10. The riders of the “ten-in-hand” slept under canvas, while the rest of the touring party slept in inns or hotels.

11. Daily Express, July 14 1888; Newry Reporter, July 19 1888; Tyrone Constitution, July 20 1888; Coleraine Chronicle, July 21 1888. The cyclists’ route went from Dublin to Drogheda and from there to Dundalk, Newry, Newcastle, Ballynahinch, Belfast, Larne, Ballycastle, Coleraine, Derry, Strabane, Donegal, Belleek, Enniskillen, Cavan, Kells, Kilmessan, and back to Dublin.

12. Daily Express, July 26 1888.

13. Irish Cyclist, August 8 1888; and Ballymena Observer, August 17 1888.

14. Irish Cyclist, August 8 1888.

15. See note 13 above.

16. See note 14 above.

17. Irish Cyclist, September 5 1888.

18. Bicycling News, December 29 1888.

19. Irish Cyclist, August 15 1888. French joined the cycling tourists in Cavan on the return leg of their journey.

20. Irish Cyclist, 8 August 1888, 15 August 1888, 22 August 1888, 29 August 1888, 5 September 1888, 12 September 1888. In a later publication, Mecredy conflated two incidents that occurred on the tour to create a fictional account. As originally described in the Irish Cyclist, the tourists camped on their first night on the site of the Battle of the Boyne, where they were joined by a number of cyclists from Drogheda as well as hundreds of “the country people” of the locality, who were intrigued by the novel sight of their camp and who watched their proceedings with great interest from the edge of a nearby quarry. The onlookers eventually dispersed, but during the night the sleeping campers were disturbed by an intruder who trod on a stick and thereby alerted the sleepers to his presence. This unwelcome visitor fled before he could be caught. On the next day, the tourists paid a visit to the round tower at Monasterboice, where they were met with “solemn silence” by the locals, who, because of their unusual cycle, mistakenly took them for emergency men who were taking part in an eviction some three miles from Monasterboice. A well-known cyclist from Drogheda named Harbison managed to convince the locals of the cyclists’ true identities: Irish Cyclist, August 8 1888. Writing about the “tendam” tour more than 20 years later, Mecredy’s version of the tourists’ first night’s camp was almost unrecognisable from the version that had been published in the Irish Cyclist in 1888. In the later account, when the cyclists’ conducted their sing-song around their camp fire, “the whole-souled patriots of Drogheda jumped hastily to the conclusion that we were emergency men, and that the ten-in-hand was a new kind of battering ram. Hence it came about that just as we commenced our nightly ‘sing-song’ round the camp fire, the low hills to eastward, overlooking the camp, began to swarm with sullen, silent men, who sat biding their time.” Luckily for the tourists, Luke Healy of Drogheda – brother of the famous priest raconteur, Fr Healy – arrived with a cornet under his arm and began to play a selection of “Fenian” airs, such as “Ninety-eight,” “The West’s Awake,” and “The Wearing of the Green,” and the hostile crowd eventually dispersed, “having no doubt come to the conclusion that men who favoured music of this nature could not possibly be traitorous emergency men”: Mecredy, Health’s Highway, 19–20.

21. Some of these sketches were based on photographs taken by Jack White, one of the “tendam” riders.

22. Irish Society proved to be wildly optimistic in its speculations on the beneficial impact of Mecredy’s promotion of cycle camping: “A certain number of ladies and gentlemen proceed to act on this idea, with the following result – They must purchase machines, that means employment for the makers; they must purchase the requisite costumes, that means employment for the costume makers; they must purchase tents, employment for tentmakers; they purchase food; result, money to purveyors. We need not trace the electric shock of activity once started through its multitudinous channels, but the reader can reflect that all those employed in the first instance will in turn employ other subsidiary workers for their own necessities. The result to the cycling tourists is an increase of health, which means increase of energy and a consequent improved effect on the general work of the world”: Irish Society, September 7 1889.

23. Irish Cyclist, July 10 1889.

24. Mecredy and Stoney, Art and Pastime, 122–7.

25. “Nearly thirty cyclists,” who slept in five tents, participated in the Irish Cyclist camping trip to Scotland: Mecredy and Stoney, Art and Pastime, 124.

26. Irish Cyclist, September 12 1888. Mecredy considered round military tents to be the best available form of tent.

27. Irish Society, August 23 1890; Mecredy and Stoney, Art and Pastime, 113–9. The campers used a variety of tents on these trips. These included waterproof gypsy tents made by the Waterproof Material Company of London. Measuring 10 ft by 8 ft, and holding from six to eight sleepers, they cost £5 8s. 6d. A canvas tent of the same size costs £1 less. Some campers chose bell tents from Pope’s of Downham Market, Norfolk, which cost £1 9s. The Pope firm had “an enormous stock of discarded military tents,” which explains why its tents were so cheap: Mecredy and Stoney, Art and Pastime, 113.

28. Irish Society, August 23 1890; Montgomery, R. J. Mecredy, 10.

29. Introducing their account, they stated that “A description of one will do for all”: Mecredy and Stoney, Art and Pastime, 119.

30. Mecredy and Stoney, Art and Pastime, 119–121.

31. Griffin, “Irish Cycling Clubs,” 108.

32. Social Review, March 30 1895; Irish Cyclist, May 30 1895.

33. Weekly Irish Times, 22 September 1894; Irish Cyclist, 21 April 1895, 11 September 1895, 18 September 1895, 25 September 1895; Kerry Sentinel, February 12 1896. Mecredy retained his fondness for cycle camping holidays in Kerry in the first decade of the twentieth century: Mecredy, Health’s Highway, 23–7.

34. Irish Cyclist, 26 September 1894, 3 October 1894, 10 October 1894; and Mecredy, Camping in Kerry.

35. Manchester Guardian, September 10 1894.

36. A photograph of their camp may be seen in Irish Cyclist, July 18 1894.

37. In March 1896, Wolseley gave a talk to the Ballymena Young Men’s Christian Association on “My bicycle tour and camp life,” which was illustrated by limelight views which he and his companions took on their tour. According to the Ballymena Observer, Wolseley’s presentation “abounded with humorous incidents connected with camp life, and was written in a fluent, racy style, which carried his audience with him from start to finish with unremitting interest”: Ballymena Observer, March 13 1896. The 1901 Irish census records just one A.D. Douglas Wolseley – this was Alfred Douglas Wolseley, the 27-year-old son of William Charles Wolseley, a Ballymena linen manufacturer.

38. “Cycling and Camping, Lough Gill,” Irish Tourist, July 1898. The two friends spent their time in swimming or rowing on Lough Gill, cycling to nearby scenic sites or to Sligo town, or shooting game. One evening, while they were rowing on the lake, they were invited to participate as “honoured guests” in a wedding dance and party that was taking place at a cottage near the lake.

39. Wicklow People, July 28 1900.

40. Holding, Camper’s Handbook, 2–3.

41. Ibid., 3.

42. “A Bicycle Tour in Ireland,” Buckingham Advertiser, October 14 1876.

43. Reid, Roads, 126.

44. Holding, Cycle and Camp, 10–1, 202, 205–6.

45. See the positive reviews in The Scotsman, June 6 1898; Cycling, June 11 1898; Cheltenham Examiner, June 22 1898; Tamworth Herald, June 25 1898; St James’s Gazette, July 5 1898; Irish Cyclist, July 6 1898; The Globe, July 18 1898; Pall Mall Gazette, August 10 1898. For an account of two men’s cycle camping tour in Ulster that was prompted by reading Holding’s Cycle and Camp, see Cycling, October 27 1900.

46. Cyclists’ Touring Club Gazette, March 1902; Holding, Camper’s Handbook, 3–4; and Constance, First in the Field, 15–21.

47. The Irish contingent included George Halliday, a commercial traveller from Rathmines, William M. Conway, a cycle agent from George’s Street, Dublin, Patrick McGlynn, a grocer and draper from Clara, and J. C. Cooney, an ironmonger and cycle agent from Navan: Irish Cyclist, August 20 1902; 1901 Census of Ireland.

48. Mayo News, August 23 1902.

49. Irish Cyclist, August 6 1902.

50. Irish Cyclist, 6 August 1902, 13 August 1902, 20 August 1902, 27 August 1902, 3 September 1902; Yorkshire Post, August 22 1902; and Mecredy, Health’s Highway, 109, 115–7.

51. Irish Cyclist, September 3 1902.

52. Irish Cyclist, October 15 1902; Irish Times, October 21 1902. Details of occupations from 1901 Census of Ireland.

53. Irish Cyclist, 19 August 1903, 26 August 1903, 2 September 1903, 9 September 1903, 16 September 1903, 23 September 1903, 30 September 1903.

54. Irish Cyclist, 13 June 1906, 20 June 1906.

55. Irish Cyclist, 14 August 1907, 21 August 1907, 28 August 1907; and Mecredy, Health’s Highway, 23–7.

56. Daily Telegraph, 29 July 1909, 13 August 1909. Lough Dan was a popular destination for Dublin cycle campers and day-trippers: Mecredy, “Open-Air Life,” 581; and Pyle, “Lough Dan.”

57. Irish Cyclist, 11 April 1906, 5 September 1906, 19 September 1906 1906; Holding, “Cycle Camping Notes,” Cyclists’ Touring Club Gazette, October 1906; Constance, First in the Field, 28–9. Fifteen new members, including John Hilliard, manager of Killarney’s Lake Hotel, were elected to the NCCC at the Killarney camp, bringing its overall membership to close to 200: Irish Cyclist, September 5 1906.

58. Only three women took part in the ICCA camp in Kerry in 1908: Irish Cyclist, August 14 1908.

59. Irish Cyclist, June 10 1908.

60. Irish Cyclist, June 3 1908. Bacon was the secretary and a founding member of the Mowbray House Cycling Association, a co-operative cycling club established in 1892 by W. T. Stead, editor of Pall Mall Gazette, to make bicycles accessible to working women who could not otherwise afford them. It also promoted rational dress for women cyclists. In May 1908, Bacon was sentenced to two weeks in prison, for failing to be bound over in her own recognisances for £1 and failing to provide a surety of £1, after a disorderly incident at 10 Downing Street when a group of suffragettes tried to present a petition to Prime Minister Asquith. In 1909, she went on a three-week solo bicycle camping tour in Munster. Details from The Woman’s Signal, September 13 1894; Irish Cyclist, September 11 1907; Manchester Courier, May 22 1908; “A Bachelor Girl’s Camp in Ireland,” Cyclists’ Touring Club Gazette, May 1909; and Hanlon, “Mowbray House.”

61. Smaller ICCA cycle camps included a weekend excursion by 11 members from Dublin to Silver Strand, near Wicklow, in August 1906: Irish Cyclist, August 29 1906.

62. Details from Irish Cyclist, 2 February 1907, 25 April 1906, 10 June 1906, 8 August 1906, 9 October 1906; Northern Whig, 29 June 1907, 12 July 1906, 24 May 1906. It is possible that Clonmel’s Star Cycling Club’s summer camp at Ardgeeha in the summer of 1906 was also influenced by accounts of the ICCA’s camps: Irish Cyclist, September 19 1906.

63. Tyrone Constitution, 28 July 1909, 26 July 1905, 21 August 1907, 18 June 1908, 24 September 1909. Loughmuck Campers whose occupations can be identified are William J. G. Roulston, a shopman in an Omagh hardware shop; Walter V. Bates, an assistant in an Omagh chemist’s shop; and Armour J. Macfarlane, a photographer. Robert J. Waterson’s occupation is not described in the 1901 census; his father was a corn and coal merchant in Omagh. Information from 1901 Census of Ireland and Tyrone Constitution, March 30 1906.

64. Holding, Cycle and Camp, 11–2.

65. Belfast News-Letter, June 8 1905.

66. “Camping Out in Donegal,” Coleraine Chronicle, January 18 1908. The 1911 Census of Ireland records that McElderry, who resided at 4 Charles Street, was the son of a retired grain merchant. His occupation is listed as “grain merchant & manager of markets.”

67. Daily Mail, August 2 1913.

68. Irish Cyclist, January 2 1895; “To the Source of the Shannon,” Weekly Irish Times, October 3 1903; Manchester Courier, January 5 1912.

69. For instance, “Government bell tents” costing a mere 30 shillings, a fraction of their original cost of £6, from Andrew Potter’s Wolverhampton tent works, were advertised in numerous Irish newspapers in 1897 and 1898. For just some of many examples, see Londonderry Journal, August 6 1897; Coleraine Chronicle, August 7 1897; Kildare Observer, August 7 1897; New Ross Standard, August 6 1898; Belfast Weekly News, August 6 1898; Sligo Champion, August 13 1898; Mid-Ulster Mail, August 27 1898. The advertisements in 1898 stated that the advertised price included carriage costs.

70. Descriptions of improvements in tent design, including the increased reduction in tent weights, may be found in Manchester Guardian, December 1 1902; Ballinrobe Chronicle, June 11 1903; Irish Cyclist, 8 August 1907, 21 August 1906; Mecredy, “Open-Air Life,” 579, 581; and Mecredy, Health’s Highway, 20–1. The Irish Times of April 1 1910 explained that, “Thanks to the enthusiasm of certain pioneers it is now possible for the everyday cyclist to carry with him, whithersoever he goes, a temporary home with full equipment, including bedding, provisions, and cooking utensils, without overloading his bicycle or requiring more than ordinary physical exertion during his progress, his impedimenta only meaning the transportation of a few extra pounds of weight. Modern ingenuity has rendered it possible for all the cycle camper’s requirements to be constructed on feather-weight lines. Complete tents only weigh a few ounces, and a similarly wonderful lightness is recorded for the various utensils and cooking stoves needful.”

71. Irish Cyclist, 6 August 1908, 22 August 1902. Bleakley waterproofed his linen tent by using boiled linseed oil. Other cycle campers who often eschewed the use of tents were R. Archer, A. Hopkins, and Rhys Pugh (the last-named was one of the staff of the Irish Cyclist), who formed part of the cycle camp to Brittas which was organised by Mecredy in August 1906. As there was no room for them in the five tents used by the campers, they slept in a dry ditch under two waterproof rugs. Mecredy explained that they were “well used to this method of reverting to the simple life, for they are in the habit of carrying out week-end fishing excursions into the mountains and sleeping in the woods or under furze bushes”: Irish Cyclist, August 22 1906.

72. The Loughmuck Campers’ entertainments provide a good example of how cycle campers entertained themselves when living under canvas. Picnics, cricket, and boating formed a regular part of their leisure activity during the day, and they also competed frequently in eight-a-side rifle shooting contests with teams from Omagh and Portora Royal School, the latter of whom were holders of the All Ireland Shield for this sport. As was commonplace at cycle campers’ gatherings, evening sing-songs were a regular feature of their camps, but the Loughmuck Campers’s sing-songs differed from those of other cycle campers due to the fact that they had enough talented musicians to form their own band: details from Tyrone Constitution, 24 July 1909, 7 August 1903, 8 July 1903, 28 July 1904, 30 March 1905, 4 May 1906, 20 July 1906, 1 November 1906, 15 November 1907, 20 March 1907, 17 April 1908, 21 August 1908, 18 June 1908.

73. Young, Heading Out; Sirost, “Du Campement au camping;” Sirost, “Habiter en camping;” Sirost, “Débuts du camping;” Pye, Fellowship Is Life, 50–1; Walker, “Outdoor Movement;” de Abaitua, “Art of Camping;” and Gorn and Elliott, American Sports, 169.

74. Irish Wheelman, August 7 1894. Organised camping became increasingly popular with various groups in Irish society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially organisations that were closely linked with the Protestant churches. These groups, in their various ways, believed that outdoor activities such as camping were not only healthy but would help to combat degeneracy amongst Ireland’s young male population. The organisations were the Young Men’s Christian Association (Wicklow News-Letter, July 2 1898; Church of Ireland Gazette, July 6 1900; Wicklow News-Letter, August 1 1903; Leinster Express, November 19 1911), the Church Lads’ Brigade (Ballymena Weekly Telegraph, July 27 1901; Newry Reporter, July 16 1910), and the Boys’ Brigade (Belfast News-Letter, July 17 1909; Tyrone Constitution, July 30 1909; Londonderry Sentinel, July 31 1909; Northern Whig, June 30 1910; Wicklow News-Letter, July 9 1910; Power, “Irish Boys’ Brigade”). Most of Sir Robert Baden-Powell’s Boy Scouts organisation in Ireland, although it was denominationally neutral, consisted mainly of Protestant boys and youths, which is not particularly surprising, considering its overtly imperialistic ethos (Gaughan, Scouting; Totten, The Tenth, 1–6; Power, “Boy Scouts”), Na Fianna Éireann, the republican boy scout organisation, could not have been more different than Baden-Powell’s group in this respect, but it shared with its larger rival a fondness for camping: Irish Independent, August 18 1908; Evening Telegraph, 13 August 1911, 22 July 1910, 26 August 1911, 25 November 1911.

75. It is revealing that those who went on cycle camping trips organised by R. J. Mecredy in the 1890s and early 1900s often referred to themselves as “savages” or “Mecredy’s savages,” or were described in these terms by others: Daily Express, June 12 1908; Irish Times, June 12 1908.

76. “A Camping Out Holiday. A Howth Experience,” undated Irish Packet article in Northants Evening Telegraph, September 17 1904.

77. Irish Independent, July 5 1906. The camp fire was an essential part of the camping experience: not only did the cyclists do their cooking on it, but their evening sing-songs and other entertainments were conducted around it. One of the most unusual camp fire amusements was the mock trial which cycle campers in Derrynane held on one of their number, who was accused of stealing a cow after he had been heard to say that he would like to eat some ribs of beef, shortly before it was reported that a local farmer’s cow had gone missing. The campers played the parts of spoof judges, jurors and defence and prosecuting counsel, watched by a crowd of almost 100 local people, who enjoyed the amusing impromptu theatricals. Two real Royal Irish Constabulary men took part in the proceedings. The accused, a Dutch cyclist named J. C. Pretorious, was found guilty; the judge decreed that “the prisoner [should] be taken from the place he now stands and made to stand in the place he is taken to”: Irish Cyclist, August 14 1907.

78. “Camping Out in Donegal,” Coleraine Chronicle, January 18 1908. McElderry and his friends subsisted partly on rabbits that they caught in snares (in which they also caught at least one wildcat). A duck that one of the group ran over on a cycle ride also ended up in the campers’ cooking pot.

79. Country dwellers were often puzzled by the desire of cycle campers to undergo the apparent hardship of camping or sleeping in tents, of living in “the free and easy manner of the gypsy.” For example, E. J. O’Reilly, a London-based Irish cycling journalist who wrote under the pseudonym of “The Scorcher,” who was one of the cycle camping parties at Glen Inagh in August 1902, reported that the locals “seemed to be hugely delighted and not a little puzzled at the whole affair.” They were particularly fascinated by the campers’ habit of washing themselves each morning in a bath that they had installed near the tents: “This morning rub seemed to amuse the natives of the neighbouring slope of Lissoughter Mountain immensely. Like the Boers in the Transvaal they were invisible to the naked eye, and yet loud shouting and laughter proclaimed they were interested observers of our ablutions.” An “ancient dame” in Kerry in August 1903 considered Thomas Hiram Holding, who had erected his tent near Looscanagh Lake, to be an object of curiosity, “a harmless, good-natured man, she explained, but a little weak in the head.” R. J. Mecredy imagined that she considered the other campers to be “an absolute band of lunatics.” According to Holding, “the comparatively poor, untravelled, and innocent people” in Ireland variously mistook him for “a pedlar, a circus outrider, an exciseman, a bill poster, a political spy, a railway surveyor, a poacher, a wandering shoemaker, a tinker, and even a beggar” on his camping trips. The theosophist married couple, James and Margaret Cousins, was fond of going on what they called “miracle hunts” – cycle trips in the West of Ireland, to visit various archaeological sites and other locations connected with local folklore, travelling by bicycle and sleeping in a gypsy tent. While engaged on a two-month “miracle hunt” in the Clifden neighbourhood, many of the local children were so fascinated by encountering “a rale gintleman and lady in a tent” (the only tents in the district before this being circus tents), that they neglected their cow milking duties and visited the married couple in their tent instead: Irish Cyclist, 13 August 1903, 20 August 1902, 19 August 1902; Holding, Camper’s Handbook, 55; and Cousins and Cousins, We Two, 143.

80. Mecredy, Health’s Highway, 25.

81. “With a Tent in Connemara,” Irish Cyclist, September 2 1908.

82. See note 76 above.

83. “Six Weeks Under Canvas,” Weekly Irish Times, May 5 1905.

84. “Camping Out in Donegal,” Coleraine Chronicle, January 18 1908.

85. Cycling, November 9 1904; Wicklow News-Letter, September 16 1905; Irish Cyclist, 14 August 1907, 28 August 1907; “Camping Out in Donegal,” Coleraine Chronicle, January 18 1908.

86. Irish Cyclist, July 15 1908.

87. For example, one of the cyclists who was forced to abandon their tent because it was invaded by ants admitted that he did not enjoy either that experience or the experience of being flooded out of their tent after a particular heavy downpour. He wrote that, “I suppose I did not like those things at the time, but looking back on them now after two years’ perspective, they seemed to enhance the delight of that camping out holiday.” The bull attack at Silver Strand was the subject of a comical account in the Irish Cyclist, with an accompanying amusing cartoon which depicts the chased cyclists scrambling over and under a barbed wire fence and taking refuge in a tree. The Irish Cyclist also published two cartoons titled “Gilligan & McGurk Go Cycle Camping,” which poked fun at the supposed perils facing the cycle camper in Ireland: “A Camping Out Holiday. A Howth Experience,” undated Irish Packet article in Northants Evening Telegraph, September 17 1904; Irish Cyclist, 8 July 1908, 15 July 1908.

88. See note 83 above.

89. de Abaitua, Art of Camping, 32–4.

90. It is no coincidence that many Irish cycle campers were also keen sportsmen. Not the least of these was R. J. Mecredy, who was a champion tricyclist and bicyclist in Ireland and Britain in the late 1880s and 1890s. Amongst the perceived benefits of cycle camping was a broadening of one’s mental horizons; as claimed by James Cousins, cycle camping “broadens one’s views of nature and humanity”: Irish Cyclist, July 1 1908. Mecredy claimed that “a cycle camp is a new Utopia, where every man works for the common good, where social position is counted as naught, and a man is judged from the standpoint of natural uprightness and courtesy”: Mecredy, “Open-Air Life,” 582.

91. Irish Cyclist, February 21 1906; Sports Argus, May 25 1907.

92. Irish Cyclist, August 1 1906. The Howth campers passed their time by hill climbing, cycling, swimming, walking, and playing water polo and cricket. Other sources that referred to campers’ bronzed features include the Northern Whig of May 24 1907 in its description of the Bohemian Campers, when it stated that “Judging from the bronzed features of the regular habitues, camping must be a healthy form of sport,” and the Irish Cyclist of June 17 1908 in its description of the audience at an ICCA public meeting at the Leinster Lecture Hall in Molesworth Street, Dublin: “Young men, with features bronzed by the touch of much sun and good air, walked about, animated monuments to the advantages of existence as carried out by members of the Irish Cycle Campers’ Association.”

93. Northern Whig, June 12 1908.

94. Freeman’s Journal, June 12 1908.

95. de Abaitua, Art of Camping, 33–4; Young, Heading Out; Wenham, “Popularisation of Camping,” 66–7; and Sirost, “Débuts du camping,” 607–9.

96. Daily News, March 23 1906; Mecredy, “Open-Air,” 578–9; and Mecredy, Health’s Highway, 31–3. Mecredy explained that “Microbes require quiet to live happily and bring up their families,” a situation which was rendered impossible by having fresh air circulating throughout one’s tent: Mecredy, Health’s Highway, 43.

97. Cricket and Football Field, June 13 1908; Mecredy, Health’s Highway, 18, 24, 30, 65–9; and Daily Mail, August 2 1913.

98. Mecredy, “Open-Air,” 580; and Mecredy, Health’s Highway, 21–3, 28, 33, 35–6.

99. Sirost, “Débuts du camping,” 609.

100. Irish Cyclist, March 14 1906; Mecredy, “Open-Air,” 578; Daily Telegraph, November 13 1908; and Mecredy, Health’s Highway, 31, 34.

101. 1911 Census of Ireland, household return for 85 Oldconnaught, Rathmichael, Dublin.

102. For examples of children as cycle campers, unaccompanied by adults, see Irish Tourist, July 1898; Weekly Irish Times, 1 August 1910, 1 January 1908, 24 September 1909.

103. Friss, Cycling City; McGurn, On Your Bike; Herlihy, Bicycle; Norcliffe, Ride to Modernity; Holt, “Discovery of Rural France;” Ebert, Radelnde Nationen; and Taylor, Claim on the Countryside, 151–90.