Dingle is on the way to nowhere but itself. Overshadowed by the Ring of Kerry, the more touristed peninsula to the south, Dingle juts off the west of Ireland like an infant’s finger.
The heart of Dingle is dotted with watering holes within less than a mile of each other, making it the perfect place for a pub crawl after a long day of driving. Start at the intersection of John and Main streets, stroll along Main until you hit Green Street, and then head straight toward the water, turning west onto Strand Street. In a short distance, you hit a multitude of taverns, spots like Paudie's Bar (inside the lovely Dingle Bay Hotel) and McCarthy's beloved McCarthy's Bar and Dick Mack's Pub.
Don't worry about traveling back to your accommodations after tipping back a few or a few too many. In Dingle, some of the bars, Murphy's Pub, for one, offer cosy lodging for overnighters, but be sure to reserve in advance. If you’d rather not stroll, you can roll: the Dingle Shuttle Bus offers highly regarded guided pub tours on the peninsula.
I prefer to come at it along the south coast on R561 from Killarney, twenty miles to the east. That way I can stop at Inch Beach, the wide and flat mile of sand where the wind is always ripping off Dingle Bay. Wildflowers line the N86 on into the town of Dingle. It’s just a few short blocks and a dozen excellent watering holes, none better than Dick Mack’s Pub and Haberdashery on Green Street, a one-stop shop for a pair of waders, a tweed hat, and a pint. Around the corner on Goat Street, Tom McCarthy is a seventh-generation barkeep at McCarthy’s Bar. “My father, and his father, and his father…”
But there’s more than drink in Dingle: the Carol Cronin Gallery on Green Street is awash in powerful seascapes. “I came to Dingle and stopped looking,” she told me.
It was Cronin who sent me farther out into Dingle, along the Slea Head Drive. The R559 feels like Ireland felt when I first arrived: the road is remote, rambling, narrow, ungraded, unmarked, precarious, and thrilling, and the end of the line in Dunquin provides a wild vista over the sea to the Blasket Islands and America beyond.
Do anything you can to get a boat ride out to Great Blasket (photo below). The now-uninhabited island was home to a few dozen hearty Irishmen and women who spurned the modern world until the 1950s. I’ve never felt more a part of the Auld Sod than when I was clinging to its edge on Great Blasket:
17 May 2016
Ireland for the day
The BBC has an article by Andrew McCarthy about another driving tour of Ireland:
Rico says his friend Stefan is going with his wife, and Rico hopes he can see all this...
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