Intrepid backpacker tracks down king

HE’S the Englishman with sore feet who travelled the length and breadth of Ireland in boots not made for walking.

His cheap boots were so bad that electronic technician Ian Middleton, 32, left the country sore and blistered but still wanting more.

The determined backpacker has come back again but this time he’s driving a van.

He travelled from Cork to Donegal with a heavy bag strapped to his shoulders, to prove that backpacking really means keeping a bag on your back.

“I wanted to try and be a real backpacker. This meant carrying the bag on my back everywhere and not taking the bus at all,” Ian said.

Ian decided to write a book about his five week trek during the summer of 1999, called Hot Footing Around The Emerald Isle.

He returned to the country this week to sell the book from the back of his camper van.

“I never really intended to be a writer but the experience was so great that I put it down on paper,” he said.

While Ian’s lack of literary ambition becomes painfully obvious, he still revels in telling us about his trip.

He liked the countryside but cities didn’t fill him with awe. When he had walked to Donegal, he heard there was a king living in the area, and just had to meet him.

“It’s not every day that you can meet a king so I pulled out all the stops to get to Tory to see him,” he said.

Eventually he came face to face with the accordion-playing King of Tory, Patsy Dan MacRuadhrí. And if all that wasn’t exciting enough Ian also recalls that a short walk on the Beara Peninsula took nine hours after he the intrepid explorer got lost.

“We were completely lost and what should have been a fairly short journey lasted nine hours.

“It was really tough and I was wearing my backpack all the time,” he said.