IRELAND
out and alone into nature quickly — that’s part of its magic. There are areas that feel untouched by time.” Ciarán isn’t from these parts — he grew
up in the mountains of County Wicklow — but has met me in the south west for a bespoke, private version of Wilderness Ireland’s Hiking and Island Hopping Cork and Kerry group tour. He hums the ballad Come by the Hills as we climb through wetlands, past burial mounds and ringforts, towards Eagle’s Rock. Ciarán is only in his late 20s but has an encyclopedic grasp of the country’s complex mythologies and flora — and thoughtful takes on our times. “You’re visiting at a special time. Ireland’s reawakening, discovering itself, figuring out its identity,” he tells me. “We’re an ancient country but, in terms of independence, also barely 100 years old. For a while, we leaned into the whole ‘leprechaun’ thing,” he says, skewering the use of corny motifs taken from folklore and splashed across keyrings and fridge magnets. “But people are finding that we have a real connection to the land, the trees, the rocks, the language, our stories. We’ve been through a lot, but it wasn’t lost. We’d just forgotten.” “Throughout our history, invaders came
for glory, because it was a holy land, a famous land, a fertile land, or whatever their reason,” Ciarán continues. “But they all fell in love with it and mixed in. That’s the true character of the land and the people: something very old and accepting. And it’s surfacing again. You need only look at our politics.” In 2015, Ireland legalised same-sex
marriage — becoming the first country in the world to do so by popular vote; two years later, it elected as premier Leo Varadkar, a trailblazing young, gay politician and the son of Indian immigrants; and in 2018, a referendum resulted in a landslide win to legalise abortion. “But,” Ciarán says, adding a humble caveat, “these are my just philosophical musings based on little more than walking in the hills.” Our walk ends with hot chocolate and hearty soup at clifop coffeeshop Caifé
na Trá, from whose windows we’re giſted expansive views across a choppy strait to the Blasket Islands. The weather has cleared and we can see the main island’s wide smile of a yellow beach is dotted with seals basking in the sun. Below us, a handful of brave surfers chase waves to shore. In my hands, I’m turning over a piece of slate bought from a local artisan; it has the word ‘love’ carved into it in Ireland’s ancient Ogham script. Together, the markings look like a broken feather, or a tree with short, erratic limbs. Inscriptions like these — some dating back to the fourth century — can still be seen on some of the almost 100 standing stones across Dingle. Ciarán explains these are markers proclaiming the name of the local clan. “West Ireland is one of the last places where
you can still imagine what Celtic Europe was like before the Roman Empire,” he explains, as the waitress swings by with seconds. Latin culture only arrived here later, with English rule and the Roman Catholic Church. “The Gaelic language survived in rural pockets like this that were hard to colonise,” Ciarán continues. “And people kept the culture alive through songs and the stories. That couldn’t be subdued. You can’t stop someone singing a song, can you?” The following day, we head to a lesser-
visited part of the peninsula. The hedgerows around the village of Annascaul are heavy with the fantastical remnants of late summer: shocks of fuschia bells and plump bilberries. A bauble-round robin flies around us, its wings purring in the warm air. “It’s good to have a guide in Ireland,” Ciarán insists. “This walk would just be a footnote in a guidebook, if that. And you’d miss all this.” The Con Dubh Loop Walk is one of his favourites as it has “maybe the quietest places in Ireland”. We explore a rustic graveyard of cairns and crypts, where many inscriptions have been buffed away by time and the elements. Interestingly, here lies early 20th-century explorer Tom Crean, a local lad who signed up for three legendary Antarctic missions, including Robert Falcon Scott’s Terra Nova Expedition (1910-13), and
At the former smugglers’ cove of Derrynane Harbour, we’re met by a briny slap of ocean air, an excitable sheepdog and a small flotilla of f ishing boats. Somewhere out of sight is the archaeological marvel of Skellig Michael, an island settled by a dozen Christian monks in the sixth century and, today, abandoned to seasonal bird colonies
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nationalgeographic.co.uk/travel
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: A ram in a coastal pasture, Dingle Peninsula; visitors scale treacherous steps on Skellig Michael known as ‘the way of Christ’; patchwork of fields near Allihies on the Beara peninsula
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