Day Seven: Medieval Ireland
- Erin Nixon
- Apr 30
- 6 min read
I woke up early as usual, but unlike other days, I’m already really close to everything and nothing opens until 10 am. So there’s no point in trying to get out early. I had asked for breakfast at 8 am, so I got most things packed and put in the car and then went down to the dining room to eat. The full Irish was excellent (definitely still too much food), but it was nice to relax for a bit. It rained over night so the morning was overcast.
Full Irish Includes: Bacon rashers, sausage, eggs, black pudding, white pudding, a tomato, and toast. I definitely won’t be needing lunch…
After breakfast I still had an hour to kill so I went back to my room and cross stitched an until 9:30. It’s about - 30 min. drive to my first stop, so once I was checked out I got on the road. I’m going to be visiting Kells Bay gardens, the gardens (but not the house) of a local hunting lodge right on the sea. As I’ve gone along there are significantly more one lane roads, and the entire road to Kells was no different. One lane blind curves all the way down. I got there just as they opened and got to be one of the first people in the garden.
Yeah, I thought it looked a lot like New Zealand too. Turns out that’s because those are Tasmanian ferns.
For a moment, I thought I was back in New Zealand. There were enormous tree ferns everywhere and after the rain it felt like I was walking through a temperate rainforest. Kells Bay has a really impressive collection of plants and landscaped areas, including a traditional Irish bog area (with walkways so we don’t die). The pathways definitely got a bit challenging in places and they even have a Himalayan rope bridge spanning across the path in one place. It was a lot of fun, and I can imagine that families with young kids would also enjoy it.
Doing a morning wander in the bogs of Ireland. As one does.
The rope bridge was surprisingly safe and fun. There should be one in Arkansas over the Buffalo River for sure.
I got back on the road and the next stop was Killagha Abbey. If you are wondering why there are so many Irish cities that begin with “Kill/kil” it’s because in Gaelic, “Cill” means church or churchyard, so all of these cities and downs are named around the churches that once stood there. And there were a lot of churches on the west side of Ireland. Because apparently the monks were really into the brutal solitude of Kerry and Dingle and wanted to get as far away from civilization as possible to built their abbeys and monasteries.
Killagha Abbey is a ruin now, but it’s still a functioning churchyard where families are still burying their family members, so the ruin is still alive in some way. Killagha/Killcolman is basically in a cow pasture down some rough roads, so once I made it out of that, I found the highway to Dingle, and started my serious exploration into pre-Christian and early Christian history of western Ireland. Because the Dingle peninsula was relatively remote, some of the ancient structures actually survived.
The Dun Beag fort was built on the cliffs overlooking the sea, around 500 BCE. And remained in use until 400 AD when the Vikings began raiding Ireland. Let’s all take a moment and put that in perspective. The US is celebrating its 250th anniversary, and this place was in active use for around 900 years. And the foundation and walls are still here. Wild.
The pathway was line with these massive cala lilies.
There is an insane lookout over the cliffs right from the fort, which is dangerous for the long-term prospects of the fort because of erosion and storm damage.
Cashel Murphy is right down the road, so I took a quick detour to see that next. It was built and used during the same period as Dun Beag, but Cashel Murphy is a fortification that was primarily a residence with potential religious associations, since some of the room placements are aligned with key constellations and the timing of the solstices. All of these places are effectively in sheep fields and they have (what I can only assume) is the most junior member of the family tasked with working the ticket booth, so there was a 16 year old kid explaining all this history for us.
Ancient castle with a view.
This entire road is supposedly two-way but is effectively a one-lane road with two directional traffic that hangs off the side of a cliff, which drops directly into the Atlantic Ocean. But unlike Scotland, there’s actually a little rock wall. So…yay safety?
The last stop on this coast road is Slea Head itself, which is the tip of this part of the Dingle Peninsula. Not even much of a pull off to park the car, which was fairly terrifying, but the cliffs are wild.
That would be a long drop into the Atlantic for sure…
The Blasket Center is a stop that I hadn’t completely decided on until I got to Dingle, and I am so glad I stopped here. Blascaod Mor is an island off the coast of the Dingle Peninsula that was populated by a small community up until 1952. The Blasket Center is an amazing space where they have managed to preserve the stories and the way of life for this community after it had to be evacuated in 1953. Because the residents were largely isolated, they had one of the most well preserved Irish-speaking communities in Ireland, a rich oral tradition of storytelling, and they had many residents write books about life on Blasket.
Part of the museum was set up with recordings of some of the residents speaking in native Irish, so I recorded part of the exhibit, because you must listen to Irish being spoken. It sounds nothing like English.
I loved getting to learn about the stories and see how folks lived on this very isolated island. It was actually very sad to learn that a lot of the younger community members ended up emigrating to the US to be able to make a better living and send money back home, which led to the eventual collapse of the community, because they relied on small boats going back and forth between the mainland and the island to survive, and there weren’t enough young men to row the boats at a certain point.
This was just heartbreaking. This is an installation in the museum in front of a window overlooking Blascaod Mor in the distance. One of the many boats that never returned.
After leaving the Blasket Center I made one last stop at an early Christian church called the Gallarus Oratory. It’s a really fascinating blend of Irish traditional architecture blended with some building techniques of the early Christian churches that gave us pitched roofs and windows.
You wanted to see inside it, right?
It was getting close to 4 pm and I needed to check in to my B&B at the Waterfront, so I drove the short way back to Dingle and got checked in. The host was lovely and pointed out some of the arts and crafts displays for Bealtane that were going on.
Great small room. I highly recommend.
I dropped off my things in the adorable room, and then went to go explore Dingle, which is extremely cute. There are lots of shops and pubs and I spent a couple of hours just looking at everything before popping into a pub. I got the Guinness beef stew and a cider and got to relax for a bit listening to all of the bartenders speaking to each other in Gaelic. Since getting to Dingle I’ve noticed there is significantly more Gaelic happening everywhere. There are some places where they don’t even bother translating the road signs into English, so I’ve tried to remember enough of what I’ve learned to translate for myself. I’ve learned that “Go Mall” means “Slowly”. It makes me happy that they’ve made a point of trying to get the Irish language back. So many places lost their native language as a result of colonialism, but because of places like Blasket, at least in Ireland they are able to bring it back now.
After having a nice dinner I walked through a few more shops on the way back to the B&B then decided to crash for a bit. It had been a full day of driving, and tomorrow I have to drive to Galway. It’s the third largest city in Ireland, so I’m expecting Dublin-esque driving shenanigans, along with the significant amount of driving I need to do to just get to Galway from Dingle.
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