A Vagabond's Notebook, Kuklos (1908) The Daily News 232pp 10cm x 14cm Our highways and byways a century ago by arguably Britain's most important cycling journalist

William Fitzwater Wray had been producing weekly pieces for The Daily News for thirteen years when this collection of his work appeared. It is an indication of the following that his writing had developed that the newspaper decided that such a collection would find a market.

It comprises eleven pieces, apparently lifted from the paper without amendment, that vary in length between 1,800 and 5,000 words. All but one recount either weekend or longer tours around areas of known natural beauty. Among those included here are several tours of the Yorkshire dales, the English Lake District, Cornwall, Brittany, the Isle of Wight and a long tour of Ireland.

The Victorian railway boom had taken much of the traffic from Britain's roads. High passes, in particular, that were once the mainstay of cattle droving, had almost completely disappeared from national attention. Kuklos describes a period when such routes were being rediscovered - initially by cyclists, and quickly afterwards by motorists. He describes forlorn moorside inns that were barely scratching a living and roads little better than cart tracks, and the cyclists he met discovering these wild places anew.

He sets off, week in week out, on his 'Enfield', sometimes alone, sometimes with a friend, and records his experiences through a swirl of literary and classical references - but in a style that is no less accessible today than it was when penned for a popular newspaper. Indeed, the surprise of his work is that it is has none of the stodgy formality that characterised much Victorian journalism.

He describes a countryside in transition. Interest in the great outdoors and remote places might have its roots in the romantic movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century - but Kuklos describes the moment when the natural world became accessible for the first time to urban working classes. It is generally pretty exhilarating stuff - although his circumnavigation of west Cork was accompanied by a torrential rain that will be familiar to many of us who followed in his wheel tracks.

"It was the wettest ride of my cycling career. The rain got into all the packages on my machine - even into the roll of clothing, etc on the back carrier, contained in two pieces of mackintosh cloth. The spare stockings, by good luck, were dry. I got an old newspaper and put half of it down the front of each leg of my breeches, a dodge which I suppose all old cyclists know. Gouganebarra Lake lies in a high impasse of the hills which close upon it steeper and loftier, till they join hands at the end and cry "Thus far!"

Opposite the hotel, the farther shore of the lake is almost a sheer ascent of Mount Bealick. Between the two is a wooded peninsular with a ruined oratory. The hotel stands on the nearer of eastern shore and is as much a farm as an inn. It is run by homely country folks, and I have stayed at few more delightful places. Although the coaches from Glengariff and Macroom call here every day, this hotel has not yet got the usually objectionable atmosphere of the full-blown resort, with its abject waiters, stiff formality and "attendance extra". The glen is equal to the best of the English Lake District."

Compared with The Kuklos Papers (1927), Wray is significantly less reflective about the nature of cycling itself that make him such an important shaper of the idea of cycling. Nevertheless, as an evocation of the experience of pedalling about the Kingdom in the years before World War One, it is among the best.

TD Nov 10

The hotel at Gougan Barra is slightly more sophisticated now, but still worth a visit.

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