GOING PLACES: When dotcom burnout left David Moore at a loose end, he decided to recover with a cycle trip to Italy in the footsteps on St Columbanus. The secular pilgrim talks to Ruadhán Mac Cormaic
Back when the exotic was a notion so broad that, for Irish people, it embraced anywhere safely beyond Skibbereen, things were simple for travel writers. Unfamiliarity carried the text, and the formula thrived. But with the global hum of the Internet and the rise and rise of low-fares air taxis, the stock of otherly places shrivelled fast. The local became a continent. And for the publishers there was only one solution: a sub-genre. Quare goes quirky. Here, the destination fitted the theme, or sat in as a means to an idiosyncratic end. Thus, skiing in France, wine-tasting in Italy or getting a chase from a bull in Spain.
Another breezy quirk was the introduction of the inanimate third-party to nudge the interplay between author and place. Tony Hawks negotiated Ireland with a fridge for company. Pete McCarthy covered the same ground with a phonebook in search of pubs bearing his name. For David Moore, avowed agnostic, the unlikely companion was St Columbanus.
"I had a historical interest in him," says Moore, "and I'd studied him in college, so I knew he was an interesting character. I liked that he had a drive and a purpose that I completely lacked. I didn't know what I wanted to do, whereas he was focused and uncompromising. The rough journey he did, from Bangor in Co Down to Bobbio in northern Italy, looked great too."
Moore's indecision followed three years spent in the maelstrom of the late-1990s Internet roar, where he worked first as "our man on the prairie" for an Irish e-learning firm and then in Silicon Valley. "I suppose I'd fallen accidentally into the whole Internet area, although I was interested in it. If you were going to be working on the Internet at that time, California was the place to be. People genuinely thought they were changing the world, however misguided that seems now."
The punishing hours and frenetic pace of life took a toll, however, and after three years in the US, Moore booked a ticket back to Dublin, departing just as Silicon Valley started to implode under the weight of its own self-delusion. "When I left, my boss told me I'd never be rich. As it happened, I sold my options within six months of leaving, and had I stayed another year the options would have been worthless."
Brought up in England, Moore's Irish mother had ensured that he was no stranger to Dublin by the time he came to Trinity College to take a postgraduate degree. In England, he's Irish. When he returned to the city after California, Moore found himself at a loose end. "I had a house in Dublin, but I found it difficult to return. The place seemed a bit too big. I had about enough savings to last me a year, and I wasn't sure what I wanted to do.
"So I decided on this trip. Perhaps it was a distraction in some ways. I thought I'd decide what I wanted to do afterwards. It was a reward for all the time spent working in the States. And something completely different."
For a few months, he researched St Columbanus's routes across the continent, eventually deciding to take a solitary journey in the Celtic saint's footsteps, by bicycle. Travelling 2,000 miles, Moore spent two months on the road, hugging the Loire from western France towards to Vosges and then south through Germany, Austria and Switzerland, before hauling himself over the Alps for the penultimate leg in northern Italy. A spiritual journey?
"Starting off, it wasn't. There was a historical interest and a desire to see these places. Rather than just heading off anywhere, this gave it all a shape. I liked cycling too. But as the trip went on, it came to mean more to me. It became more of a pilgrimage than I'd imagined, even though I'm not devout. The closer to the finishing line I got, the more proud I became. While working, I hadn't had that sense that something meant a lot to me."
In Bobbio, burial place of Columbanus and final stop on Moore's itinerary, he met an American girl from Santa Fe. Now married, they plan to move to the States, where he recently completed another two-month cycle, this time along the Mississippi river. "You see so much more on a bike. A mile done in a car is very different from the same mile by bike. There's nothing like riding through the early morning; the sun is shining, the road is completely empty, you're in a gorgeous part of the world, singing. And you feel, 'Yes, this is what I want to be doing'."
The Accidental Pilgrim: Travels with a Celtic Saint by David Moore is published by Hodder (€15)