MacsTravel Blog

We left Dingle relatively early to fit in a couple of hours of hiking before we were due at a local farm for a sheep herding demonstration. Our destination was Annascaul, a spectacular river valley of “commonage”: land held in common ownership by local farmers for the purposes of grazing livestock (sheep in particular).

This is a beautiful place, exactly the type of landscape that Robin and I pictured walking through when we booked our trip to Ireland. The river at the base of the valley is fed by dozens of streams and waterfalls all along the valley.

Hills rise steeply on each side and they are peppered with Blackface Mountain Sheep, the hardy breed most suitable for these rugged hills and intemperate climate.

We walked up into the valley for about an hour and then retraced our steps. At times it was overcast, lightly raining, and at times the sun broke through the clouds, changing the colours of the hills into a kaleidoscope of shades of green. It was an idyllic Irish morning.

We left Annascaul and wound our way over the two way track road back to the main roads and down to Derrymore to take in the West Kerry sheep dog demonstrations as demonstrated by Seamus and Bridget on their working farm. It was absolutely incredible. Robin and I had seen a demonstration at a sheep farm in New Zealand a few years back, but Bridget in particular made this a very invitational and interesting morning, and took the three sheepdogs through an incredible demonstration of their skills and training.

Bridget spent time explaining the various phases of the year and the use of her 8 sheep dogs in driving her heard of 800 plus sheep up into the hills and back down to the farm for vaccinations, breeding and lambing. We also got to meet a couple of “pet” donkeys and take a look at a Roma caravan that they have repurposed for getting some rest on the hills during lambing season.

Getting a chance to feed some of the lambs that had been abandoned by their mothers was also pretty great.

We also met “Skip”, the jumping pet lamb who sat on Bridget’s lap in the cottage while Seamus entertained us by playing the bodhrán (Irish drum), a combination I did not have on my bingo card that morning.

We did learn that the wool from Irish lambs is virtually worthless and that this is a meat industry, not a sweater driven industry! Imagine Robin’s shock. Irish sweaters are now produced almost exclusively with merino wool imported from New Zealand and Australia.

We took a lunch break in Listerwol, home of the Kerry Gold Irish Butter plant (Irish butter is unbelievably good). We found a terrific little cafe and enjoyed a delicious bowl of soup and a salad.

We left Listerwol for Kilkee via the Shannon ferry, a short cut that took a couple of hours off the drive.

Kilkee is a charming little seaside community with incredible beaches, popular with the Irish as a summertime destination. We were there for the cliffs.

There is a marvellous pathway that skirts the cliffs and it was sparsely used, allowing us to take some incredible pictures of the pounding surf against the shore.

Stevie pointed out the ruins of a church on top of one of the sea stacks, which are created when coastal erosion separates the stack of land from the mainland. You can see the ruins on the sea stack on the right in the photo below. In this case, erosion led to a precipitous drop in church attendance.

As we wound our way down the coastal path we came upon a hardy group of swimmers frolicking in a tidal pool while the waves of the North Atlantic crashed on the reef at the mouth of the bay.

Just adjacent to the frozen swimmers was a statue of famous Irish actor Richard “Dickie” Harris, who turns out to have been Kilkee tennis champion on multiple occasions. Apparently, if the statue is accurate, he played tennis in his bare feet.

The Irish are a different breed.

We finished the day at our hotel in Spanish Point, so named to mark the wrecks of three ships from the Spanish Armada on the rocks off shore in 1588. The hotel, of course, was called the Armada.

We lugged our bags up to a lovely huge room with giant windows that, unfortunately, smelled like a sewer. We asked the staff member who had swung by to drop of welcome chocolate if she noticed the smell. She agreed that there was a strong sewer smell coming from the drain in the tub. Another staff member arrived with a bucket of scented cleaning fluid which she sluiced down the drain for 15 minutes. The smell disappeared, but reappeared again just as we were heading to dinner. Complaints were made at the front desk and everyone agree that we needed to switch rooms, I was briefly shown the only free room they had which did not smell like a sewer before they ushered me back to the dining room, saying that they would move all of our luggage to the new room.

Dinner was great! I ate a giant bowl of mussels and Robin enjoyed a nice veggie curry.

When we opened the door to our new room it thankfully was free of any sewer stench. Unfortunately, it was also free of a window to the outside other than a tiny skylight in the ceiling, and it was about the size of a moderately large walk in closet. In fact, we are pretty sure this was a utility room at one point, and certainly would fail any reasonable fire code.

But the mussels were great.