Steep cliffs near the lower slopes of Mt. Brandon
August 15-18, 2022
There’s no visible border or “Welcome to the Republic of Ireland” sign when driving the A1 from Belfast to Dublin. It’s the softest of soft borders. But somewhere in rolling hills, the road markers switch to kilometers, payment changes to Euros and a new culture rises with the rolling hills.
Continuing from Dublin across the centre of Ireland, the land rises and falls in a patchwork quilt of dairy farms in a hundred shades of green. On the west coast, the hills finally rise into lumpy mountains and sheer cliffs on the Dingle peninsula, a top five spot of our whole sabbatical.
The quaint town of Dingle is a bit overrun, but the peninsula itself is sparsely inhabited. Rather than the land rising gently from shore, mountains rise sharply from the pounding surf then taper off into rolling farmland. For reference, Luke Skywalker’s island exile in Star Wars Episode VII was filmed nearby. And the non-Jedi history of the peninsula is particularly rich with more than 2000 neolithic ruins, a 1300 year old church (Gallarus Oratory) and the Blasket Islands – a self-sufficient civilization with a phenomenal literary output in the Irish language.
As Rick Steves notes, “There’s a feeling of closeness to the land in Dingle. When I asked a local if he was born here, he thought for a second and said, ‘No, it was about six miles down the road.’”
We loved hearing traditional music at An Bothar pub, hiking the lower slopes of Mount Brendon, exploring Oceanworld and the Great Blasket Centre, and long chats with our host Bridie. At this point into the sabbatical we were at a saturation point for new experiences, but Dingle expanded our capacity and left us wanting more.
Photo Gallery - Dingle
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