looks a little like a hand (or paw), with five “fingers” (toes?) stretching south-westwards into the Atlantic Ocean. From north to south, there’s:
On Monday, we “did” the Iveragh Peninsula (Ring of Kerry). Our next choice? Well, the Beara Peninsula is well spoken of, and had its attractions because of Bantry Bay’s role in folksong (
Star 
of the County Down: “From Bantry Bay up to Derry Quay …”). But Megs and Pete had given us some names of pubs in Dingle that had
seisiúns; Dingle Peninsula is in Kerry, and we were temporary “Kerrymen”, (whereas most of the Beara is in Cork); and Margaret’s Irish colleague Tom had suggested Dingle for sightseeing, so those three facts decided us on The Dingle Tour.
The day was windy and wet, so we spent the morning saving yesterday’s photos to the laptop and then writing up a couple of days’ worth. We left for Dingle about midday, driving across to Castlemaine, famed in Australian folksong as the home of
The Wild Colonial Boy (“Jack Duggan was his name, He was born and bred in Ireland in a place called Castlemaine”—and the pub named after him is on the Tralee Road, except his real name was Jack Donohue). From there, we took the R561 westward and along the north shore of Castlemaine Harbour, which is the start of the south shore of the Dingle Peninsula.
Castlemaine Harbour (which is really the mouth of the River Laune) is remarkable for the pair of
long sand-spits that almost enclose it, one (Inch Strand) stretching south from the Dingle Peninsula, the other (White Strand and Rosbehy) stretching north from the Iveragh Peninsula. We passed through Inch village (
Inse) at the north end of Inch Strand, and made our first stop at the top of a ridge that forms the base of the
Strand. The sky had cleared a little, but there was still a near-gale wind blowing from the west, bringing lots of raindrops (not enough to be called “rain”, but enough to be annoying), so we took photos from inside the car. You see here (above) a view south-east along Inch Strand, and (left) due south to the Iveragh Peninsula and King’s Head—where we stopped on
Monday, to photograph the Dingle Peninsula …
The town of Dingle lies on the south coast of the peninsula, about two thirds of the way along from the mainland towards the ocean. We drove there, with the sea on our left hand and the glacier-scored
Slieve Mish mountains on our right, with the intention of getting late lunch; stopping a couple of times along the way to snap “the scenery”—like this patchwork of fields to the south of the road, a little west from Milltown.
We found Dingle to be very busy (there was a funfair in town), and there seemed to be no parking available, but plenty of other people looking for some. So we went on to wherever the next likely spot would be.
This turned out to be the (relatively!) large village of
Ventry, at the head of Ventry Bay. In Irish, the village is called
Ceann Trá, which means “Head of the Beach”, because it lies at the top of the bay and at the north end of a rather fine sandy beach that sweeps round the bay’s west side. Midway round, the sea god, Mananann Mac Lír, came to the aid of the hero
Finn MacCool (
Fionn Mac Cumhaill) and helped him repel the invading armies of Daire Domhain, “the King of the World”.
(But hang on—the bay is
Cuan Fionntrá, which translates as “Ventry Bay”—so what’s going on, if “Ventry” is actually
Ceann Trá? It turns out that the real Ventry,
Fionntrá or “White Strand”, is a tiny cluster of cottages half-way round the beach, the site of the
Cath Fionntrá or “Battle of Fionntrá”; and the English have transferred their version of its name to the larger
Ceann Trá. Huh! What do the English know?)
Prominent at Ventry (
Ceann Trá, that is) is a triangular intersection where the coast road west
meets the village road that stretches back (north) into the peninsula. That’s where you’ll find the
Ventry Inn with the
Paud Q
uinn (Quinn’s Bar). The road up through the village climbs a slope, and the Inn sits on a small rise at the foot of it, with a good view over the bay. Inside is a traditional-style pub, but with some charming portraits of local people on the wall. Outside, if the weather’s okay, you can sit at wooden tables and enjoy the view. Which is what we did, in fine sunshine, while enjoying lunch from their full menu.
On our trip along the southern edge of the Dingle Peninsula, we’d once again passed several
examples of the astonishing outbreaks of brightly-coloured wildflowers that had so delighted us on our Ring of Kerry tour: the scarlet fuchsias, purple loosestrife, and white and, especially, startlingly orange blossoms, whose names we didn’t know. There was a clump of these wildflowers behind a wall, across the road from where we were sitting, and Margaret asked the waitress if she knew what the orange flowers were. She did: “
Montbretias.” So now we knew.
By now it was mid-afternoon, around 3-ish (we were getting used
to these late lunches!). We farewelled Ventry (
Ceann Trá) and continued round the bay, looking out for what we hadn’t found in our Ring of Kerry tour: a good place to pull off the road and photograph those wildflowers. A little south-west of the real Ventry (
Fionn Trá), the main road turned right at a cross-roads, and there was exactly what we were looking for, a gorgeous display of wildflowers, and a place to pull over for them!
Before setting out, we’d consulted the
Guide Killarney to see what the
Dingle Peninsula had to offer, but mostly we were playing it by ear. But as we continued west on the Slea Head road, we approached the
Celtic and Prehistoric Museum, and Don remembered that it was said to be very well worth a visit. And despite a rather unpreposessing first appearance, once we’d paid our €4.00 (each) entry fee, it proved to be a treasure trove of antiquities, reminiscent of the Tardis—much bigger on the inside than there seemed to be room for on the outside (as well as a trip through time)!
Here there are over 500 artefacts—statuettes, ornaments, pottery, coins, weapons …—from the
Irish Stone, Bronze, and Celtic Iron Ages, as well as Viking, Saxon and Roman objects, and others from the Middle East, all well displayed in cabinets. Here too is the world's largest fossil Woolly Mammoth skull and tusks (dredged up from the North Sea and painstakingly reassembled from hundreds of fragments; see the rare photo of Don!), a nest of fossil dinosaur eggs, and a complete fossil baby dinosaur skeleton. The museum shop was a wonderland of antiques, fossils, handmade jewellery, crafts and gifts, and while we tried to be restrained, we nonetheless bought an antique (reproduction …) map of Ireland and an Irish phrase-book (Don couldn’t resist).
After about an hour in the museum, we set off westwards again along the Slea Head Road, heading this time for a specific target: Dunbeg (
Dounbeag)
.
Dunbeg is a prehistoric (Iron Age) stone fort set dramatically on a sheer cliff at the base of
Sliabh an Iolair, Mt Eagle. The fort stands within the triangle of a small promontory, with four parallel stone-faced banks and ditches to protect it on the landward side. There’s a large inner
clochán (stone hut, roofless of course), and the “paving stones” that form a path to the fort entrance are also the roofing-stones of a long
souterrain, a type of underground dwelling-space, the first we’d encountered off the pages of a book.
Across the road from Dunbeg is the little community of Fahan, a handful of cottages on the
south-eastern flank of Mt Eagle. This stretch of country is littered with the remains of
clocháns, “beehive huts” (there were once over 400 of them, but many have been destroyed), collectively known as “The City of Fahan”. These drystone huts, with their corbelled roofs (overlapping rings of stone like an upside-down circular staircase, giving their “beehive” shapes from the outside), are often impossible to date; corbelled roofs date back at least 5,000 years, but
clocháns were still being built for animals into the mid-20th Century.
Continuing west towards Slea Head, the road kinks to the north to accommodate the ravine of the
Abhainn an Ghleanna, the “Glen River”, not
much more than a stream really, but it has cut a 1.5km long runnel from halfway up the mountain down to Dingle Bay. A little way up the glen, the road performs a hairpin which takes it through a ford, which was in good flow with all the summer rains. A little further along, at Glanfahan, we stopped to visit a group of Iron Age
clocháns within a stone-walled enclosure. Within the walls was a mix of open spaces, smaller enclosures,
clocháns, and passageways, with large slabs punctuating the walls and edging doorways.
A couple of the
clocháns were very well preserved, with their capstones still in place, though they looked rather leaky from the inside, and may have been livestock shelters rather than dwellings, for all we knew.
Here too there was another
souterrain, and unlike the one at Dunbeg, it was partially uncovered so you could see how it looked inside, or even climb down into it.
Leaving there, we came at last to Slea Head (
Ceann Sléibhe), where the
road turns northwards and skirts Coumeenoole Bay (
Tráigh an Choma). There’s a scenic lookout providing a panorama westward, over the
Blasket Islands (
Na Blascaodaí) about three kilometres offshore. Some of the finest Irish folk literature and oral history were written down on the Blaskets between 1900 and 1950, but population decline led to the islands’ being abandoned in 1953.
There were a couple of other cars parked at the lookout, and as we drew in we saw a girl holding out food for the hovering seagulls to take from her hand. One of its fellows flew down onto the wall next to the car, and looked at us with the half-cocked sideways look gulls have when they’re hoping for food. Margaret stayed in the car and watched, while Don got out and sat on the wall a few feet from it, and fed it fragments of crisps from his outstretched hand.
Across the road is a larger-than-life whitewashed sculpture of the Crucifixion, with the three Maries weeping at the foot of the cross: “Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James and Joses, and the mother of”
Christ Himself, bowed down and overwhelmed by her grief. (The locals know the sculpture simply as
An Cross, Anglo-Irish for “The Cross”.) Rust stains the palms and legs of the crucified Man like blood, and has dripped onto His Mother’s hair and face. The landscape behind Him is stark and rocky, the view before Him beautiful, or bleak. Here, just short of the end of Europe, we are reminded of the world that lies beyond, and the Doorway to that world.
The road continues north a short way, then bends to the west, towards Dunmore Head (
An Dún Mór, headland of the Great Fort), which is the most westerly mainland point of Ireland, and so the most westerly in Europe. It forms the northern wall of Coumeenoole Bay, as you can see in this photo (with the gull still next to our car ) taken northward from opposite
An Cross. It is there, where the end of the land meets the vastness of the ocean, that Christ’s sombre gaze is fixed.
It is possible to walk out to that westernmost tip, but it’s more than a kilometre, and a rugged tramp over or round the hill; so we contented ourselves with taking photos of the headland, the Blaskets beyond, and the landward countryside, where cottages, ruined barns and homesteads,
clocháns, and drystone walls scrawled mysterious messages up the side of Mt Eagle.
We continued north on the R559, then turned eastward and inland-ward at
An Ghráig. There were many sites we would have liked to visit, but time was getting on, and we were forced to be selective. Passing through Ballyferriter (
Baile an Fheirtéaraigh) and skirting the southern shore of Smerwick Harbour, we arrived at the Gallarus Oratory about 18:30.
Gallarus was built by local farmers of the area, at a date estimated generally between the 6th and 9th Centuries, for use as a centre of worship. The oratory’s simple architecture (shaped like an upturned boat) and unrestored state (since it is so well built, it has never needed repair) has withstood the Atlantic Margin weather for over 1200 years. Like the ring forts and the
clocháns, it’s built of local stones fitted together without mortar (“drystone”), and has developed only a slight sagging in the roof. Just alongside the oratory, in a bed of stones to the northeast, is a metre-high slab with an encircled cross and an inscription in half uncial script that reads “COLUM MAC DINET” (“Colum, son of Dinet”).
From Gallarus, the R559 turns northwards via Murreagh, Cloghaneduff, and Kilmalkedar, but evening was drawing on, so we cut across via a country road to rejoin the R559 little more than a kilometre to the east (just south of—wait for it—
Ballynana). From there it was only 10 minutes back into Dingle.
At first we drove round Dingle (
An Daingean) a little (it’s only a
little town!) to suss it out. The funfair was still going, but things had calmed down somewhat. We drove round Strand Street (the seafront), up Dykegate St, and left up Main St to Upper Main St, where we paused to photograph the genuine old cottages on the north (left) side of the street, and the modern ones on the south side …
We drove back down to the Strand, and found a car park in the harbour-side parking area, which had previously been full. Across the road was the recently-built
Dingle Bay Hotel hosting Long’s Restaurant and Paudie’s Bar. This was on the list of
traditional Irish music sessions that Megs and Peter had given us, so we reviewed the sign on the window (“all musicians welcome”) and the menu, decided it looked good, and went in.
Our meals were excellent, and further enlivened by a friendly young English waitress who’d lived in Dingle from the age of eleven, and who relished the opportunity to sit and chat “about the menu” for a minute or two (and who also taught us how to say “thankyou” in Irish:
go raibh maith agat, “
guh rah mah hahgut”).
After eating, we ordered a couple of drinks, managed to find seats at a table right next to the musicians’ performing area, and waited for the seisiún to start, which it did around 9:30. There were two performers initially, a youngish man on guitar and a young woman with a good voice on vocals, but they chatted together and bumbled around (knocking over a full glass of drink in the process) and had only managed a couple of songs in half an hour, after which they were joined by an older man with an accordion. Sadly, the unprofessional performance continued, with more chatter between the musicians than there was music, and with songs that discouraged audience participation (so much for "all musicians welcome"). After another half hour, we left to find an alternative
seisiún.
Our memories of what was where, gained from our earlier drive round, were roughly accurate,
but coloured by the speed a car moves. Walking up to Main St, where there were other pubs featuring sessions, took much longer than we expected, and when we got there, the pubs were very full (to overflowing), and what we could hear of the “
seisiúns” was solo performance without participation (apart from a truly awful version of
Fields of Athenry, from—ironically—the only “audience participation” session we found!).
On the other hand, we did see a number of shops with strikingly original decoration!
Giving up on the
seisiúns, we had a pleasant, if slow, walk back to the car, and drove back to Aghadoe Cottage under a clear, brilliantly starry sky, getting there about 11:30. And so to bed …
On Valencia, we followed an unmarked road westward to Foilhomurrin Bay, beyond which the road to the island’s south-western tip is unsuitable for cars. Here there was another fabulous panorama over the Valencia estuary, westwards to the Atlantic, where the pyramid-shaped Skelligs poked up on the horizon: Sceilg Beag, “Little Skellig”, the closer, and Sceilg Mhicíl, “Great Skellig” (also known as “Skellig Michael!”) the more distant.
We crossed back over Maurice O’Neill’s bridge, turned right on the R566, and continued westward through Portmagee on the Skellig Ring.
