On Monday Mark and I left Killarney for the Beara Peninsula a little later than we expected. When I tried to unlock the car with the fob, it wouldn’t work. Mark thought maybe the battery in the fob had gone dead. But when we got in the car, it was the car battery that was dead. I’d left the lights on the night before. Emer Moynihan, the owner of the Earls Court House Hotel, arranged for someone to come to the hotel to give us a jump and we were on our way 30 minutes later.
Once on the road, we drove through some of the most beautiful countryside that Ireland has to offer. We drove south through Killarney National Park, past pristine lakes, and with Ireland’s highest mountains, the Macgillycuddy Reeks, to the west. The park is heavily forested, and it reminded both of us of driving through Oak Creek Canyon in Arizona; imagine Oak Creek on steroids with about twice the volume of vegetation.
After we drove over the Kenmare River, we were on the Beara Peninsula. For the first several miles we were still in forest. We stopped when we saw a sign for the Cashelkeelty Stone Circle. We didn’t have the right shoes to tromp through the mud to find it, but we did walk in because it was just so beautiful. The ground was completely covered with small shamrocks. There was a stream tumbling musically over rocky outcrops. The whole place glowed green. It looked so aggressively verdant that I could imagine being swallowed up by it if I stood still for even a few minutes.
A few miles later, though, the landscape changed dramatically. Beara is rocky, and the Irish consider it bare and stark, but dramatic. It’s still very green, though, and definitely not bare or stark by Arizona standards.
We stopped in Ardgroom for lunch, and asked for directions to the Chailleach Bheara, or the Hag of Beara, the great rock that was the point of our journey. We drove around all around Kilcatherine Point, a small loop on the peninsula. Here are the small villages and crossroads that we passed on the way: Faunkill, Ballycrovane, Gortgariff, Kilcatherine, Dreenamalack, Dreenacush, Derryvegal, Darrigroe, Cleandra, Drombeg, Ardgroom Inward, and then back to Ardgroom.
Mark took the first picture of the Killarney Lakes, the one of the ogham stone, and the sign of the hag (that's her down on the slope). I took the other two. Click on any of them to see them larger. At Ballycrovane, we saw the largest ogham stone in Ireland, about 17 feet high. Between Gortgariiff and Kilcatherine we found the Hag of Beara. We stopped at the ruins of Kilcatherine church, windswept, atmospheric, and yes, stark. We found a pottery studio between Drombeg and Ardgroom Inward. The loop from Ardgroom and back is only 25 km, or about 16 miles, and it took us two and a half hours. Round trip, the whole drive was about 100 miles and it took us six hours.
