My wanderlust naturally pulls me eastwards. Without flying, it’s been in the direction of the rising sun that I’ve looked to see what deserts, mountains, and palaces I can reach by train. Maybe this oriental tug is down to my own cultural interest, or even to familial roots pulling me back to Mitteleuropa and beyond; or I might, just about, still hazard that we Brits are an outward-looking nation, naturally harking back to our internationalist past. That said, and least prosaically, it might simply be that we’re almost on the westernmost point of Eurasia ourselves: when you start by train from St Pancras, All Roads Really Do Lead To Paris, or at least Brussels.
But, European outliers thought we may be, it turns out we’re not the ones living on the tip of Europe after all. That would be the Irish, our closest neighbours, both culturally and geographically. This is blindingly obvious; yet I know I’m not the only one of my circle who’s needed three decades or more finally to set my compass towards Dublin. This summer, I finally got there: my aim was the Beara Peninsula in the southwest of Ireland, and specifically the dramatic walking route that circumnavigates it, the Beara Way.
I was happy to find that reaching Ireland by train and boat was quick, and cheap. A single ticket (£41) took me from Euston to Holyhead and by ferry to Dublin. From the offset, Ireland was familiar: post-boxes disguised in green paint, and traffic on the right (lefthand) side of the road. None of the charming biscuit-tin gables you get travelling across Germany, but rather hardy, red-brick terraces evoking northern English mill-towns. The Irish people were, per stereotype, spectacularly friendly: each new encounter was like meeting an English person I already knew, and liked to boot.
I travelled by train from Dublin Heuston onwards to County Kerry and my walk’s starting point in Kenmare. I allowed eight days for the 160-odd miles, lugging my trusted backpack and camping and cooking gear. (I carried my own food too: dehydrated meals boil-in-the-bag lasagne were light and unbelievably delicious, but cereal bars were a waste of weight: Mars bars will always be king.)
From Kenmare, I travelled west along the north coast of the Beara Peninsula, quickly leaving behind towns and infrastructure, although even after they had receded into memory, there were nearly always ranging, expansive farmhouses dotted across the landscape. Within a couple of hours I was climbing steep high meadows, with the deep blue loughs of Gleninchiquin on my left, and verdure – the bright green of grass, the darker green of rushes, the forest green mosaic of trees – all around. The west coast of Ireland is the first place that rains arrive off the Atlantic, 200 days of the year, and it teems with moisture.
The path took me to villages with names like evocative names like Tuosist, Bunane, Eyeries, and Allihies. As I progressed further toward the end of the spit of land, so the scenery and my campsites grew wilder and more beautiful. From my first campsite in a dusty, peaceful forest, I camped on a headland raised up over the Atlantic, looking out across a foaming bay. After three days’ walking I was camped as west as you can go, on Dursey Island, the farthest that Europe dares poke out into the ocean, and the last place on the continent that the sun goes down.
Dursey is only accessible via a six-person cable-car, built in 1969 and incongruously harking back to 1990s French skiing holidays. Arriving at evening I didn’t share the island with any day-trippers, but instead pitched my tent next to a ruined medieval church and roamed its length. As I passed the deserted villages of Ballyleary and Ballycrispin, only the old schoolhouse on the hill still puffed smoke; I met just a single other person, a rounded, jolly, almost Tolkienesque farmer with near impenetrable accent and differently coloured eyes. According to the info at the cable-car office, he would have been one of just three permanent residents remaining on Dursey. From the high ridge at the centre of the island I could see to the peninsulas north and south, to the Skellig Islands with their hermitages, and out beyond to the blue-grey ocean. A day of driving rain relaxed as evening drew, wisps of blue appeared in the overcast sky, and, past ten o’clock, the sea and its islands glowed with the golden light of dusk.
If Dursey Island was the climax of my time in Beara, and the return along the mainland peninsula took me away from such craggy rocks, such empty coastlines, tiny villages, and so many Irish-speaking pubs, yet the scenery still continued to amaze further inland. Perhaps I felt less pressure to have my breath taken away without having half traversed the world to see a view. Or perhaps I didn’t expect such beauty from mountains so close to home.
My last big effort was an ascent of Hungry Hill, the highest point on Beara, sat 685m high off the path to Adrigole. My task was made easier by a local called Aidan, who I’d met in Castletown and who offered to take my backpack by car, leaving me just a daysack. The approach to the hill took me through fields, crossing fences with the local version of stile that was more like step-ladder, until the mass of the hill reared up directly ahead, its flattish top covered by slow-moving cloud. I climbed up a gully as far as I could, hopping either side of a non-threatening stream and scrambling up rocks; when the gully spat me out I curved to the left, and tried to keep my path straight as possible as I climbed higher.
What looked like a straightforward, if rocky approach turned out to be an awkward, to-and-fro route, tiring me out before I eventually reached the ridge at the top, just after I had entered into the cloud. Without seeing much, I followed contours to the peak and the cairn on its top. Resting on sharp rocks I took awkward shelter from the wind and damp, leaving stones on the ground to remind myself which way to return. Made wet and blind by the cloud, my descent was necessarily slow and patient, and it was only a couple of hundred metres down, emerging into daylight, that I once more saw the broad vista across green fields to the sea, and the Sheep’s Head Peninsula beyond.
It strikes me that most the exhilaration, frustration, challenge, and fear I feel on top of a mountain in the cloud stays the same, whatever side of whichever landmass I might be on at the time. There was some familiarity even as I clambered around in the cold cloud on top of Hungry Hill. And so, my trip to Ireland and Beara was indeed entirely new for me, yet it was also somewhere that felt close and known. I’m heartened to have explored another part of my home isles, and found so much remote beauty. It seems you can find a whole different travel experience by travelling in the other direction, once in a while.
