An Daingean (Part 1)

I spent this weekend in County Kerry on the Dingle Peninsula with my dad, who was visiting me for the weekend on his way to work in Tipperary starting on Monday. It was a pretty incredible experience. The tip of the Dingle Peninsula is the furthest west point on mainland Ireland and the islands just off the peninsula are the westernmost points in all of Europe. While the weather wasn't perfect, we didn't mind seeing it in the mist and occasional rain because a little finger of land jutting out into the ocean seems more natural if it is exposed to the elements in a rather harsh manner (or maybe that's just me).

We left Cork city on Saturday morning in a rented Nissan Note armed with a map or two, a hotel reservation, and a change of clothes. The drive was to theoretically take around 2.5 hours and take us through Killarney and a variety of small towns in Cork and Kerry (including my personal favorite, Inch). We stopped in Killarney for lunch, but ran into very little traffic and ended up being on the road for just about 3 hours. Even before we arrived in Dingle town itself the trip became pretty interesting in terms of sightseeing and general entertainment. Below is a rather narrow street in Killarney. At that point in the journey we thought that this sort of street was incredibly narrow. We later learned that by comparison, this street isn't bad.


From Killarney we continued on to Killorglin, where we turned north briefly until we ran into the R561, which we took west through Inch and eventually towards Dingle. We made a brief stop at Inch point to look at the beach and coastline extending beyond the point and out into the ocean mists and rain of the western coast of Ireland. After about 3 hours in the car we reached Dingle town just as it began to absolutely pour. We then got directions to our hotel, which was in Ballyferriter (Baile an Fheirtéaraigh), a small town a few miles outside the town of Dingle where the primary spoken language is Irish. After checking in (at around 4pm) our actual exploration of the peninsula began.


More to come on the Dingle visit, most likely tomorrow.