Cycling the Grand Canal and onto the Barrow greenway – 160km off road by ebike

The longest ‘greenway’ in Ireland takes you out of Dublin alone the Grand Canal and then at Robertstown turn onto the Barrow navigation that runs to Athy and then the Barrow bank from there to Saint Mullins. This is a distance of around 160km and almost all off road BUT there are many access barriers on the Grand Canal part or the route that you will need to lift a bike over or around and a large proportion is not surfaced and so will be a rough and slow cycle. But as you will see from the video entirely possible for most people & bikes.

This video is Timelapse footage of the entire route to just below Athy (the next video will be Athy to St. Mullins) with a narration where I talk about the history and the legends of the canal and the river. The footage was recorded in August 2024 just after the cycleway to Sallins opened, if your looking at it a year or more later its quite possible more of the route is now surfaced.

You’ll find my Instagram photos and text from this cycle at https://www.instagram.com/p/C-ezjidNu3O/?img_index=1

Route map at https://cycle.travel/map/journey/617609
Cycle Travel has some section as impassable that I did in fact cycle so the route map sometimes takes roads that I did not in fact have to take. Consult the video but I did stay canal or river banks for almost the entire trip.

“I’ve been intending this cycle for a while to see if you could stay on the banks rather than having to take long sections of road. And then managed 100% bank side although that did involve lifting bike & bags over barriers and a lot of slow rough grass riding. But I still managed the 170km plus another 35km to the train station at Thomastown in two days.

I went onto the Grand Canal at Ballyfermot which starts with 7km of good surface before at the 12th lock hitting you with a double barrier. Last year I switched to the roads here and got the worst close pass of my life from a huge lorry so this year I took the bags off and lifted the bike and bags across. It’s tough from here to #Hazelhatch then it’s a good surface to #Sallins – the Sallins end just opened recently.

It’s then rough grass riding with a few tricky barriers to #Robertstown on the edges of which you turn onto a branch of the Grand Canal that links to the Barrow, the 2nd longest river in Ireland at Athy. This is all recent dust gravel as #WaterwaysIreland build the #BarrowBlueway – from planning permission signs I think they intend this surface yo run all the way to #StMullins but for now it ends near #Athy and it’s more or less grass riding from there except where the bank is a minor road.

My #WildCamp was a few km out of Athy where someone had previously cleared a tent size space in the backside vegetation on a beautiful bend near a weir. There was drizzle overnight so I packed my wet tent away around 7 and got to Carlow for breakfast at 8.”