Westport isn't an accident. Someone drew it.

Most Irish towns grew where a river met a road. Westport was designed and laid out in the 1780s around the Carrowbeg with tree-lined malls, a stone Octagon and streets that still work exactly as intended two and a half centuries later. It's one of the only planned towns in Ireland, and once you know that, you can't unsee it.

Best way to read a planned town is from a saddle. That's what this is.

What you'll ride experience

• Granuaile's water: Clew Bay was ruled in the sixteenth century by Gráinne Ní Mháille or Grace O'Malley better known as the Pirate Queen. Known for getting rid of three husbands as you'll hear - she commanded a fleet, raided from Galway to Donegal, and in 1593 sailed to Greenwich to face down Elizabeth I in Latin because neither queen spoke the other's language.
• The reek: Croagh Patrick stands over the whole ride. A pilgrimage mountain for 1,500 years, a place of assembly for far longer than that, and still climbed by tens of thousands every Reek Sunday and some of them barefoot.
• The Quay: Westport was a working port before it was a tourist town with grain, linen, and later the emigrant traffic. The warehouses are restaurants now. The stories underneath them aren't.
• The hungry years: Mayo was hit as hard as anywhere in the Famine. Westport's workhouse, the relief works, and what happened to the population between 1841 and 1851.

The tour is €25.

A local guide, an easy pace, small groups. All fitness levels, no cycling experience needed. Helmet, lock and route map included, bike sized to you before you leave.

Then the bike is yours until closing.

The tour ends. The day doesn't.

Head out the Greenway towards Newport — 12km, about an hour easy — past Rockfleet Castle, the tower house Grace O'Malley took by marriage and kept by other means. Or drop down to the Quay for chowder. Or climb the base of the reek and look back at the bay with its hundred-odd drumlin islands.

No schedule, no group, no fuss. You've had the story. Now go and stand in it.