Dingle Peninsula

A good night’s sleep and we woke up to rain. The bungalow is bigger than our own house, but much quieter. The only sounds from the outside world, other than the rain, are the Atlantic Ocean, some sheep and some lovely birdsong: heard but not seen.

In the kitchen/dining area, we found an extensive CD collection. Christy Moore and The Pogues. So we can at least drown out the sounds of nature.

Except the Christy Moore CD case is empty, and inside The Pogues’ 30:30 we found Now That’s What I Call Pop CD Three. How disappointing!

But the good news is, The Pogues’ CD was found in the CD player, and the CD player actually works.

But then again, this was the only one from the 2-CD set.

Yesterday in the car, I think it’s fair to say we were both disappointed with RTE Radios 1 and 2. Too much talk about Repealing The Eighth. It’s an important issue, yes, but we want to be entertained. And the music wasn’t to our taste, except on the Gaelic station, but the signal wasn’t as reliable

Also, the Vote Yes and Vote No posters on every lamppost don’t do much to enhance the beauty of what we’ve so far seen of The Emerald Isle, even the ones that aren’t blatant lies.

We took our time getting ready to go out, hoping the rain would ease, and that the Dingle Peninsula would live up to its reputation.

And it really did. Bright green fields, glacial valleys, mountains plus all that the Atlantic could throw at the coastline. We stopped at Inch and took a mile: in fact, we walked over three miles on the beach there, despite the wind. I think the word is ‘bracing’. But fortunately for us, the rain had stopped a long time ago.

Speaking of miles, we saw a poster for Ryan’s Daughter, the film, in the local café, and for teenage me, the big star of the film was Sarah Miles. It was filmed in the area, and they are very proud of that.

We had coffee and carrot cake at the café, part of our c-food diet, following the crisps and curry yesterday. As it’s not the full tourist season, the outside toilets were still locked up and there were no rubbish bins: recycling bins, yes, ordinary litter bins, no.

Inch Beach

This guy was the only one fishing on the beach, we have no idea if he caught anything but a few sea-birds looked hopeful. Lots of people had driven along the beach though and I made sure that if future archaeologists inspect the fossilised footprints, they’ll wonder just how 21st century walked.

After a cheese sandwich for lunch, we drove to and through Dingle itself and further west. We stopped several times to admire the views and there are not enough superlatives available, so just imagine us saying ‘wow’ on repeat.

At Dunmore Head, we joined the sheep and walked up and over the headland to within spitting distance of the furthest west point of mainland Ireland. It would be a terrific place to watch the Sun set, but that happens so much later than at home.

Tig Àine is probably the café with the best possible view anywhere. How anyone that works there does anything other than look through the window is beyond me. We had more coffee and cake while watching the waves crashing on the rocks, watching a group of five ducks amble by and admiring the pictures painted by local artists. Yes, we would have liked to buy one, but no, we didn’t, the overall plan is still to de-clutter.

After yesterday’s disappointment with the local radio offerings in the car, today I connected my phone via Bluetooth so we were able to listen to some old BBC radio programmes. Tony Blackburn’s Golden Hours is the fastest show in the world, apparently!

The drive back to base was gorgeous too and for supper we had a fry-up.

We could spent days here to be honest.