Ireland's Dingle Peninsula

Be forewarned, Ireland is seductive.

In many areas, traditions are strong and stress is a foreign word. I fell in love with the friendliest land this side of Sicily. It all happened in a Gaeltacht.

Gaeltachts are national parks for the traditional culture, where the government protects the old Irish ways. Shaded green on many maps, these regions brighten the west coast of the Emerald Isle. Gaeltacht means a place where Gaelic (or Irish) is spoken. The Irish culture is more than just the language. You'll find it tilling the rocky fields, singing in the pubs, and lingering in the pride of the small-town preschool that brags "All Gaelic." Most signposts are in Irish only, and some have the old-style lettering. If your map is in English...good luck. The oldtimers are a proud bunch. Often, when the signposts are in both English and Irish, the English is spray-painted out.

The An Daingean Peninsula — called the Dingle Peninsula in English — is my favorite Gaeltacht. While the big tour buses clog the neighboring Ring of Kerry before heading east to kiss the Blarney Stone, in Dingle it still feels like the fish and the farm actually matter. Forty fishing boats sail from Dingle, and a nostalgic whiff of peat continues to fill its nighttime streets, offering visitors an escape into pure Ireland. For 30 years my Irish dreams have been set here, on this sparse but lush peninsula where locals are fond of saying, "The next parish is Boston."

Of the peninsula's 10,000 residents, 1,500 live in Dingle Town. Its few streets, lined with ramshackle but gaily painted shops and pubs, run up from a rain-stung harbor always busy with fishing boats and leisure sailboats. Traditionally, the buildings were drab gray or whitewashed. Thirty years ago, Ireland's "tidy town" competition prompted everyone to paint their buildings in playful pastels.  

It's a peaceful town. The courthouse (1832) is open one hour a month. The judge does his best to wrap up business within a half hour. During the day you'll see teenagers — already working on ruddy beer-glow cheeks — roll kegs up the streets and into the pubs in preparation for another night of music and craic (fun conversation and atmosphere).

In the town's medieval heyday, locals traded cowhides for wine. When Dingle's position as a trading center waned, it faded in importance. In the 19th century, it was a linen-weaving center. Until 1970, fishing dominated, and the only visitors were scholars and students of old Irish ways. In 1970, the movie Ryan's Daughter introduced the world to Dingle. The trickle of fans has grown to a flood as word of its musical, historical, gastronomical, and scenic charms — not to mention its friendly dolphin — has spread.

The Dingle Peninsula Circle — By Bike or Car

The Dingle Peninsula is 10 miles wide and runs 40 miles from Tralee to Slea Head. The top of its mountainous spine is Mount Brandon — at 3,130 feet, the second-tallest mountain in Ireland. While only tiny villages lie west of Dingle Town, the peninsula is home to 500,000 sheep. The weather on this distant tip of Ireland is often misty, foggy, and rainy. But don't complain — as locals will explain, there is no bad weather...only inappropriate clothing. Good and bad weather blow by in a steady meteorological parade. With stops, the 30-mile circuit (go with the traffic, clockwise) takes five hours by bike or three hours by car.

Leaving Dingle Town, it becomes clear that the peninsula is an open-air museum. It's littered with monuments reminding visitors that the town has been the choice of Bronze Age settlers, Dark Age monks, English landlords, and Hollywood directors. The Milestone B&B decorates its front yard not with a pink flamingo, but with a pillar stone — one of more than 2,000 stony pieces in the puzzle of prehistoric life here.

Across the bay, the manor house of Lord Ventry is surrounded by palms, magnolias, fuchsias, and fancy flora introduced to An Daingean by the Englishman who once owned the peninsula. His legacy — thanks only to the mild, Gulf Stream-protected weather — is the festival of fuchsias that lines the peninsula roads. And just down the street, locals point to the little blue house that once kept Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman cozy during the filming of Far and Away.

Near a red, two-room schoolhouse, a street sign warns Taisteal go Mall — slow down. Near the playground students hide out in circular remains of a late Stone Age ring fort. In 500 B.C. it was a petty Celtic chieftain's headquarters, a stone-and-earth stockade filled with little stone houses. So many of these ring forts survived the centuries because of superstitious beliefs that they were "fairy forts."

The wet sod of Dingle is soaked with medieval history. In the darkest depths of the Dark Ages, when literate life almost died in Europe, peace-loving, bookwormish monks fled the chaos of the Continent and its barbarian raids. They sailed to this drizzly fringe of the known world and lived their monastic lives in lonely stone igloos or "beehive huts," which you'll see dotting the landscape.

Several groups of these mysterious huts, called clochans, line the road. Built without mortar by seventh-century monks, these huts take you back. Climb into one. You're all alone, surrounded by dank mist and the realization that it was these monks who kept literacy alive in Europe. To give you an idea of their importance, Charlemagne, who ruled much of Europe in the year 800, imported Irish monks to be his scribes.

It was from this peninsula that St. Brendan, the semi-mythical priest-explorer, is said to have set sail in the sixth century in search of a legendary western paradise. Some think he beat Columbus to North America...by nearly a thousand years!

Rounding Ceann Sleibhe (Slea Head), the point in Europe closest to America, the rugged coastline offers smashing views of deadly black-rock cliffs and the distant Na Blascaodai (Blasket Islands). The crashing surf races in like white horses, while long-haired sheep — bored with the weather, distant boats, and the lush countryside — couldn't care less.

Just off the road you'll see the scant remains of the scant home that was burned by the movie-star equivalent of Lord Ventry as he evicted his potato-eating tenants in the movie Far and Away.

Even without Hollywood, this is a bleak and godforsaken place. Sand and seaweed heaped on the clay eventually became soil. The created land was marginal, just barely growing potatoes. Ragged patches of this reclaimed land climb the hillsides. Rocks were moved and piled into fences.

Stacks of history can be read into the stones. From the air, Ireland looks like alligator skin — a maze of stone fences. With unrivaled colonial finesse, the British required Irish families to divide their land among all heirs. This doomed even the largest estates to fragmentation, shrinking lots to sizes just large enough to starve a family. Ultimately, of course, the land ended up in the possession of British absentee landlords. The tiny rock-fenced lots that carve up the treeless landscape remind the farmers of the structural poverty that shaped their history. And weary farmers have never bothered with gates. Even today they take a hunk of wall down, let their sheep pass, and stack the rocks again.

Study the highest fields, untouched since the planting of 1845, when the potatoes never matured and rotted in the ground. You can still see the vertical ridges of the potato beds — a reminder of that year's great famine, which, through starvation or emigration, nearly halved Ireland's population. Because its endearing people have endured so much, Ireland is called "The Terrible Beauty."

Take your time at the Gallaras Oratory, circa A.D. 800, the sightseeing highlight of your peninsula tour. One of Ireland's best-preserved early Christian churches, its shape is reminiscent of an upturned boat. Its watertight dry-stone walls have sheltered travelers and pilgrims for 1,200 years.

From the oratory, continue up the rugged one-lane road to the crest of the hill, then hurry back to Dingle Town — hungry, thirsty, and ready for a pint.

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