We Did Eat Pretty Well

Flash Nelson is prone to taking pictures of his meals. Wonder if he does this at home. But it does provide a good record of how we ate. Breakfasts, Dinners, at B&B's, Pubs, and Restaurants....

Thanks to our B&B Owners

Even though this walk, like the others we've taken, is unguided, we don't take them alone. There's a network of B&B owners who were all special. Besides providing outstanding places to stay, they were all interested in us, knowledgeable about their country, area, and town, and anxious to make sure we were well taken care of.

Here are the places we stayed, the names of the owners, and pictures. Unfortunately we don't have pictures of all of them.

Glengarriff             Island View House              Imelda Lyne

Adrigole                 Ocean View                       Margaret O'Sullivan

Castletownbere       Island View B&B               Dennis Hanafin

Eyeries                  Coulagh Bay House             Therese O'Neill

Lauragh                 Mountain View                   Sheila O'Sullivan

Kenmare                Hawthorn House                Mary O'Brien

Doolin                    Riverfield House                Caitriona Garrahy

Flash, Goat, Spartacuss, and AnchorMan

Early on, there was a suggestion that all adopt trail names (Thanks, Sandy).

Even though tradition is that you can't pick your own name, we did allow folks to turn down some of the more lewd suggestions.

 So, from right to left, meet:

Flash: Homage to the Golden Flashes of Kent State and to the silver mane.

Goat: Comfortable going over rocks and up mountains. Friendly with sheep.

Spartacuss:  Old cuss with a Spartan hat.

AnchorMan:  Frequently bring up the.... news.  

One Happy Guy

Look at the size of those Murphys!

Lauragh to Kenmare

The last day of the walk, and maybe the longest day mileage wise.

Sheila gave us a head start today and dropped us at a trail head a couple of mile up from her B&B.

From there, it was a pretty good uphill to a pass overlooking a string of lakes below and the next range of hills beyond. Downhill and past the lakes we started a long uphill on a road then up to a pass. From the top we could see Kenmare, the end of the day, still several miles away. By the time we got into Kenmare, we were so parched we went for a beer before we went for a shower.

Kenmare is the biggest town we've been in since Kinsale. Kenmare sits at the inner intersections of the Iveragh and Beara peninsulas. I've been in Kenmare before. Once when walking the Kerry Way, and once when Marty and I came back with our wives. The B&B was right in town, run by Mary O'Brien, and was where we left the car.

Lots of choices for where to go for dinner. We wound up at the the Coachmen's for some decent pub grub. Since this was the last night of the walk (and my birthday), it was a good opportunity to do some bar hopping. But everyone was too spent from the long day, so it wound up being an early night.

I haven't written much about the weather, but the weather has been an important part of this trip. Every day has been sunny, few clouds, and highs in the low 80's. That's unheard of in Ireland, particularly this part of the country. Several days have been the warmest days in decades. The local folks we've talked too all say it's the first real summer they've had in years.

And they're enjoying it. Lots of people on the beaches. (That's a relative statement. “Lots” means a dozen or less at most of the beaches we've passed.) Strangely, we completed this walk without even needing our rain gear.

But the weather hasn't been the best weather for walking. Cloudy days and cooler temperatures would have been a lot better. We've finished several days pretty dehydrated and rationing our water.

Eyeries to Lauragh

Leaving Eyeries, the Way followed a farm road, wound around the edge of a small lake, then climbed up onto a ridge. After following the ridge for a couple of miles, it dropped down onto another back road that led into Ardgroom in time for lunch. The highlight of the trail today was being in a village at lunch time, getting a freshly made sandwich, a diet coke, and sitting on a chair.

After lunch, we headed out of Ardgroom on a back road. After a couple of miles, the trail joined up with a main road with little traffic. When the signposts turned off the road, Dick and I split up from the other two. Marty and John took the path that led around the side of a hill, Dick and I stayed on the road. Longer, but easier walking. We planned on meeting at the B&B, 4-5 miles ahead.

Along the road, we stopped and talked to a man standing in his yard. Actually, he stopped us, and was anxious to talk. The man had a heavy, heavy brogue, and probably spoke in a combination of English and Gaelic. I think we talked about weather, and maybe football. We may have talked politics, but I'm not certain. But I know we all enjoyed the conversation. Then we went on.

Several miles later, we walked through Lauragh (tiny, only a post office), and turned down a back road towards our B&B. At the next intersection there was supposed to be a closed up pub where we turned. The closed pub was there, and so were Marty and John. They'd gotten there just a few minutes ahead of us. While we were taking a break there, a car drove by, stopped, and the driver rolled down the window. “I suppose you'll be staying with me tonight”, she said. It was Sheila, the owner of the B&B were heading to. Ireland really is

a small island.

That night we ate at the B&B – there's no other restaurant nearby. A great meal. We all thought it was a beef roast – turns out it was lamb.

Castletownbere to Eyeries

The walk today took us out the main loop of the Beara Way to the point where, heading northwest, it crosses the central mountains, heads down the north side, and starts turning back east. Kenmare, the end of the walk is three days away.

Just outside of Castletownbere are the remains of a stone circle, a mini-Stonehenge. Like Stonehenge, it had some religious significance centuries ago, and like Stonehenge, it's still being studied. As we were leaving the circle, a small tour was arriving. One of the folks on the tour walked past me and said “Go Green.” My Michigan State Spartan hat also has religious significance in some circles.

The trail wound up the mountain and down an old farm road on the other side. When we got to the bottom we began hearing shouts from high up on the ridge to the east. A couple of farmers were up there gathering their sheep by herding them down the mountain. They may have had dogs with them, but they were too high for us to see them. The effect of watching the herding was of little white specks (sheep) moving across and down the mountain faster than we've ever seen them move, clustering together when they got to ravines and paths, and pouring down the slope. If you've ever seen a Pachinko game, it was kind of like that.

A little further on we started looking for a place to stop for lunch. We were following around the north side of an open ridge and there were some great views of Kenmare Bay and the Iveragh peninsula.

One good spot had been taken by a Dutch couple also walking the Way. We stopped and talked to them for a couple of minutes, then moved on a few hundred yards to another spot. Dick was a few minutes behind the rest of us at this point.

Everyone knows how easy it is for Dick to make friends, and it turns out this was another example. When he got to where we stopped, Dick said that he'd come over the rise where the Dutch couple had stopped for lunch, and found the wife with her pants down. When hiking there are some things that you just have to do outdoors. Apparently the Dutch woman and Dick were both surprised and each scattered (like sheep down a mountain?) in different directions.

Dick told us that when he came over the rise he thought it was Marty. That raises a couple of questions. First, how does a Dutch woman with her pants down looks like Marty? Second, how would Dick know that anyway? 

Later on the couple walked by where we'd stopped for lunch and we all had good laugh. Poor woman. The husband said it was the fourth time today she had, uh....  Those Dutch are just full of information. 

The trail led on around the slope and down into Eyeries. Eyeries is a nice little village One store, one restaurant, two pubs, a nice B&B up on the hill. We were ultimately customers of each of these.

Dursey Island

Dursey Island is about 5 miles long and 1 mile wide, off the far western coast of the Beara Peninsula. It's separated from the mainland by a channel several hundred yards wide beneath hundred foot cliffs. It's not exactly the kind of place you would expect to find a cable car, but there is one. The cable car has been there since the fifties, and it carries up to 6 people (or some larger number of sheep) between the island and the

mainland. The six person capacity is  enough to transport the entire human population of the island at one time, should that be necessary. Transporting the entire population of sheep would take a lot of trips. Up until recently, people and sheep could share the cable car. But the Irish version of OSHA (or PETA) determined that, for safety reasons, people and sheep have to ride the cable car separately. It's probably safer for the sheep that way.

In spite of (or perhaps because of) its isolation, Dursey Island has had a bit of grisly history. The Vikings used the island to hold Irish slaves, until there were enough to send a shipload back home.

Several hundred years ago, the Beara peninsula was the center of the O'Sullivan clans. Today, every village seems to have an O'Sullivan pub, store, and bakery. In 1604 the English army, determined to wipe out the last of the O'Sullivan chieftans and his clan, pursued the clan down the Beara peninsula and onto Dursey, and massacred hundreds of  O'Sullivans there. Legend is that the English tied all the women and children together and threw them off a cliff into the ocean. A couple of days ago when we mentioned to B&B owner Margaret O'Sullivan that we were planning to visit Dursey, she only said “some bad times happened there” and her face darkened. The history between Ireland and England is long and complicated.

A loop of the Beara Way crosses the Dursey cable car and loops around the island. From the cable car, the Way follows the old road around the south side of the island and through the three “villages.” Each of the three villages consists of 1-2 houses that look like they might be occupied, and the ruins of several other buildings that obviously aren't. Then the trail climbs to the central mountain ridge and follows the ridge back.

The views the whole way are really incredible. The coastline falls away in the distance to the south and north, a few small rocky islands out in the ocean, and the Atlantic disappearing to the horizon to the west. Next stop that way

is North America.

During migrating periods, Dursey is a stop for many migrating birds. Supposedly many North American birds show up on Dursey after losing their way and flying across the Atlantic.

Dursey is a relatively popular place for Irish and tourists to visit, because of the great hike and incredible views. But in spite of the fact that we were sharing the island with 10-15 other people that day, Dursey feels immensely isolated. I can't recall anyplace where the feeling of being right at the end of the world is so powerful.

Adrigole to Castletownbere

After our goodbyes to Margaret, we started the walk today with a lift to the trailhead by Mr. O'Sullivan. Thankfully, this morning was overcast. This made for better walking, but since the day started with another climb, pretty soon we were in a deep fog. It would be really easy to get lost on the mountain in the fog, so high on the mountain, the trail markers are closer, like every 50 meters. Even so, sometimes we had to guess where the next one was, or look for the person in front of you through the fog. When that didn't work, the next step was to call out to the person in front of you, have them call back, and follow the sound of their voice. Dick swears that one time he called out, and he heard someone in front say “Shhh... he'll hear you.”

The heavy fog lasted most of the morning, as the trail wound around Hungry Hill, the highest mountain on the peninsula.. Fittingly, we stopped for lunch along the side of Hungry Hill. The fog started to lift and we started to get more amazing views of Bantry Bay, the Slieve Mish Mountains we'd been following for the last two days, and Castletownbere down on the coast up ahead.

Finally, we got to a junction where the trail stayed high following the mountain contours, or an old farm road led down towards more backroads into Castletownbere. John and Marty chose the high road again, and Dick and I took the backroads. We got in to Castletownbere late in the afternoon, and the other two guys showed up shortly after.

Castletownbere is the largest town out on the Beara Peninsula (population 900), and his a pretty active whitefish industry. It's got several pubs and around three restaurants, and is a place we're staying two nights. Our B&B (Harbor View) is a nice modern place up on a hill overlooking the harbor (hence the name), run by a very helpful innkeeper, Denis Hanafin. Denis is starting his own little guided tour business and knows this area well.

We started the evening with Murphys (and a Heineken!) at McCarthy's Bar, then went to John Murphy's for dinner. We'd been told by several people that John Murphy had the best fish and chips in the Beara Peninsula. I hate to have to say this, but one or more unnamed members of our group were disappointed when they didn't see fish and chips on the (largely fish) menu. When it was explained that the Fried Haddock and French Fries on the menu was actually fish and chips, they settled down, but I'm not sure they really believed it. The next hurdle was that John Murphy's, which has a nice little wine list, doesn't have beer on the menu. Our poor waitress assured us that if we wanted a beer, someone would go to the pub (Murphy's) across the street and bring us one. Problem solved. Then John asked if there really was a John Murphy. Our new waitress said that sure there was, but he wasn't there at the minute. A couple of minutes later, an older gentleman showed up at the table, introduced himself as John Murphy, told us he had the finest fish and chips on the peninsula (disguised as Fried Haddock with French Fries), and he'd get us some beers. To summarize, then, we had John Murphy cross the street to Murphy's Bar and bring us back some Murphy's to John Murphy's for those funny Americans.

An excellent meal followed (Haddock, Fries, and Salad for 10 Euro), followed by a walk around town, another beer or two (I can't be sure), and a Jameson's nightcap.

Starting to get in the groove now.