A Green, Wet Peninsula (Part 2)

To pick up from where I left off last night, we checked into our hotel. The view from our hotel window is above. From there we drove back to the town of Dingle, which was a few miles from our hotel, and began our westward loop around the coast.

As we set out west from Dingle the rain, which had been on and off all day, began to let up and the misty fog that had shrouded the peninsula since we had arrived began to gradually lift. We proceeded around Dingle Harbor to the next protected bay, Ventry. There we stopped at a beach and circled around the bay to look at it from the other side. At this point it is a lot easier to just use pictures:

We then proceeded further west towards the eventual tip of the peninsula, stopping a few times along the way to appreciate the breathtaking scenery and wonderful ocean views, which got better and better as the visibility gradually improved. We stopped at Dunbeg Fort, a Stone Age archaeological site on the edge of a coastal cliff. We stopped at a few curves in the road, passed a hairpin turn where a rather substantial stream flowed over the roadway, and suffered through the nerve wracking experience of driving on the incredibly narrow roads that were pretty much directly on the edge of cliffs. At one bend in the road (at Slea Head) we saw a crucifix which seemed rather randomly placed, and no obvious reason for its location was given. We passed Ryan's Daughter, the westernmost point on the peninsula, and eventually proceeded back to our hotel for dinner.

As we went to bed, we could hear rain pounding outside and the wind howling across the hills of Dingle. We were pretty much in the middle of nowhere, and it was great.

The next morning we returned to Ryan's Daughter and hiked out through fields sprinkled with sheep to the westernmost point on the Dingle Peninsula. It was VERY windy on the summit of Ryan's Daughter, which is actually a slight hill in addition to a finger of land extending into the Atlantic Ocean. As we walked out to the small stone hut on the hill, it began to rain in a very light, misty, cold fashion, blown in from the ocean. This sort of rain persisted intermittently for the next few hours.

We then went about a mile north to hike out to the end of the next finger of the peninsula, which does not extend as far west and is a bit rockier and taller than Ryan's Daughter. From there we could see a good deal of the western coast of Dingle.

From there we completed our loop around the peninsula, passing Mount Brandon and the wonderful car-falling-over-cliff sign. We returned to Dingle town for lunch at around 1pm and then began the drive back to Cork city, passing through Inch and running into traffic due to Puck Fair (an event I know nothing about other than that it generates traffic in Killorglin). On the way home we listened to Cork's Gaelic football team beat Tyrone on RTE radio followed by Cork's hurling team losing to Kilkenny (also on RTE). Both were quite entertaining to listen to.

All in all, the Dingle peninsula is awesome. And to cap off my Dingle ramblings, here is a picture of Ryan's Daughter: