Now you're talking, Jags!

Actually, soda bread is my second fave Irish bread. There's another one, called "swamp bread", that was available only from one shop in a lane off the Main Street, baked by the wife of the owner. It was a flat round bread made without yeast, with slices of tomato in it. Haven't been able to get it for many moons, since the shop closed. Big loss that. No idea whether it was only a local specialty, or maybe something the lady perhaps picked up from the Traveller community -- I say that because even more moons ago, I ate with a family of gypsies in Hungary, and they gave me bread very similar that they cooked on stones heated by their fire.

Some dishes I like cooking are at http://coolmainpress.com/andrejutefoodindex.html, for those who haven't seen them yet.

Ate that the last time I went to the Republic of Ireland. In 1978.

https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1CXZ3hXk9G/

Irish soda bread.some of you lads that can bake will like this.

Jags .

Well I've read The Soap Man book. It was a very interesting read. However it didn't explain The Golden Road on Harris, or if it did I missed that part. I resorted to Google and the only reasonable explanation was that it was rather expensive to build, hence the golden reference. Either way it was a joy to cycle.
I have a better understanding of the crofting way of life now. It was just a shame that Lord Leverhulme didn't!

Edited on Friday evening 7 November to include more details I remembered:

I use an SKS Rennkompressor. It's a tall vintage racing pump with foldout feet, offered since Jesus was a teenager, and infinitely rebuildable. The pretty accurate gauge is, unfortunately, at the foot of the pump but even though my eyes are not great, I can read it. The Rennkompressor's great advantage, after its reliability (we have a couple in use for about fifteen years and have used none of the parts laid in when we switched to the Rennkompressors) and rebuildability, is the superb multi-valve EVA head which just goes on with zero fuss and no leaks, has an easy to use flipper lock (down is locked, unlike the other pumps designed by idiots who can't spell ergonomics) and, best of all, the head by itself is available for a tenner from SJS without the tube and presumably more with the tube:



Enlarge the bottom of the complete pump on this image and you'll see the two holes in the connector end. You may be able to use just the head with whatever pump you have now. There's also now a version of the head with presumably 3 holes, called the Multivalve, and a new super-duper Clic head (with an option to fit it to existing heads), both also sold by SJS. But I have no personal knowledge of the newer heads and the Clic, so you might do well to study the Rennkompressor English page at SKS in Germany; if you do, please report back here so we can be experts too.

There are also two heads older than the one shown above, identified by having metal on the part which goes on the tube's valve. They're essentially heads for professional mechanics on racing teams which have standardized to valves suited to these two heads. The brass one for Presta appears to have been redesigned since I bought my pumps to be less of a threat to bicyclists with soft hands; the previous version had teeth rather than merely a roughened surface to improve grip. In any event, I took one look at it and decided the "professional pose" wasn't worth the bloody fingers.

In case you have to buy a whole new garage pump, you might like to know it's a pump for working mechanics, so the whole thing is a cheaper than boutique pumps for cafe racers, and the spares are a bargain. The only regrettable thing about the Rennkompressor is that it is a track pump, too big and heavy to carry with you on the bicycle, but it was born that way, and I imagine SKS found that multiple lighter-weight and shorter on-bike prototypes would undermine the Rennkompressor's fabled reputation for reliability and indefinite service life and quietly buried them.

If you buy just the head to fit to your existing pump without a gauge, or a useless gauge, or if you buy the whole pump and find the gauge a bit small and far away (Dan the Mod bought a Rennkompressor on my recommendatsion but he is a precision cyclist who uses an additional gauge to fine-tune the fifteen percent drop on his tires at any load), SJS also sells a really useful gauge. Dan has a blue one like SJS sells, and my black one is branded by BBB, but it's the same thing. Here's the one SJS sells:



It only works on Presta, and the switching between the several scales (bar, psi, etc) is a bit oversensitive until you get the hang of the pressure and length of action of the reset to zero so you can take another reading,  but that is a pretty finicky complaint for another really reliable, long serving tool, which appears to exist on thin air alone -- mine hasn't even had a new battery in a good 12 or 15 years but then I use it only to check the tyres when I intend hanging it on the limit on the downhills, alas more and more infrequently these days.

Good luck.