Kenmare & the Ring of Kerry

It's no wonder that, since Victorian times, visitors have been attracted to this dramatic chunk of Ireland. Mysterious ancient ring forts stand sentinel on mossy hillsides. Beloved Irish statesman Daniel O'Connell maintained his ancestral estate here, far from 19th-century politics. And early Christian hermit-monks left a lonely imprint of their devotion, in the form of simple stone dwellings atop an isolated rock crag far from shore…a holy retreat on the edge of the then-known world. The tidy town of Kenmare makes an ideal home base.