On my visit to Quad Attack, the first thing I was asked to do was to sign a waiver which reads "The driving of an ATV is a dangerous sport with potential for any participant to suffer personal injuries . . . Furthermore the protective head gear which must be worn by participants will not offer full protection either." Am I insane? I clamber into a pair of enormous orange overalls and wellies and think, of all the crazy things I've done for The Irish Times, this must be the most outrageous. Eileen pushes a helmet onto my head and off we go.

The bike is much more solid than an ordinary motorbike, yet after years of car-driving I feel vulnerable without any sort of seat belt.

My bike has no gears, so all I have to worry about is the accelerator (a lever I press with my right thumb) and the brakes (one on each handlebar). Turning one of these heavy bikes requires more determination than I expected, and you have to lean in to the turn.

Before I know it, I'm manoeuvring through a narrow pitted track overhung with brambles, through streams, round hairpin bends. I even manage to go up and over dips, leaning back on the way down, and forward on the way up. There is only one part where I baulk: the prospect of two steep hollows in the track. After my quad initiation, Eileen hoses the mud off me and I wriggle out of my heavy overalls, glad that I didn't have to cope with squalls of rain and slippery mud, even if that's the weather seasoned quad bikers prefer. KD