out and alone into nature quickly — that’s
part of its magic. There are areas that feel
untouched by time.”
Ciarán isn’t from these parts — he grew
up in the mountains of County Wicklow
— but has met me in the south west for
a bespoke, private version of Wilderness
Ireland’s Hiking and Island Hopping Cork
and Kerry group tour. He hums the ballad
Come by the Hills as we climb through
wetlands, past burial mounds and ringforts,
towards Eagle’s Rock. Ciarán is only in his
late 20s but has an encyclopedic grasp of
the country’s complex mythologies and
flora — and thoughtful takes on our times.
“You’re visiting at a special time. Ireland’s
reawakening, discovering itself, figuring out
its identity,” he tells me. “We’re an ancient
country but, in terms of independence, also
barely 100 years old. For a while, we leaned
into the whole ‘leprechaun’ thing,” he says,
skewering the use of corny motifs taken from
folklore and splashed across keyrings and
fridge magnets. “But people are finding that
we have a real connection to the land, the
trees, the rocks, the language, our stories.
We’ve been through a lot, but it wasn’t lost.
We’d just forgotten.”
“Throughout our history, invaders came
for glory, because it was a holy land, a famous
land, a fertile land, or whatever their reason,”
Ciarán continues. “But they all fell in love with
it and mixed in. That’s the true character of
the land and the people: something very old
and accepting. And it’s surfacing again. You
need only look at our politics.”
In 2015, Ireland legalised same-sex
marriage — becoming the first country in
the world to do so by popular vote; two years
later, it elected as premier Leo Varadkar, a
trailblazing young, gay politician and the
son of Indian immigrants; and in 2018, a
referendum resulted in a landslide win
to legalise abortion. “But,” Ciarán says,
adding a humble caveat, “these are my just
philosophical musings based on little more
than walking in the hills.”
Our walk ends with hot chocolate and
hearty soup at clifftop coffeeshop Caifé
na Trá, from whose windows we’re gifted
expansive views across a choppy strait to the
Blasket Islands. The weather has cleared and
we can see the main island’s wide smile of a
yellow beach is dotted with seals basking in
the sun. Below us, a handful of brave surfers
chase waves to shore. In my hands, I’m
turning over a piece of slate bought from a
local artisan; it has the word ‘love’ carved into
it in Ireland’s ancient Ogham script. Together,
the markings look like a broken feather, or
a tree with short, erratic limbs. Inscriptions
like these — some dating back to the
fourth century — can still be seen on some
of the almost 100 standing stones across
Dingle. Ciarán explains these are markers
proclaiming the name of the local clan.
“West Ireland is one of the last places where
you can still imagine what Celtic Europe was
like before the Roman Empire,” he explains,
as the waitress swings by with seconds. Latin
culture only arrived here later, with English
rule and the Roman Catholic Church. “The
Gaelic language survived in rural pockets
like this that were hard to colonise,” Ciarán
continues. “And people kept the culture alive
through songs and the stories. That couldn’t
be subdued. You can’t stop someone singing a
song, can you?”
The following day, we head to a lesser-
visited part of the peninsula. The hedgerows
around the village of Annascaul are heavy
with the fantastical remnants of late
summer: shocks of fuschia bells and plump
bilberries. A bauble-round robin flies around
us, its wings purring in the warm air. “It’s
good to have a guide in Ireland,” Ciarán
insists. “This walk would just be a footnote
in a guidebook, if that. And you’d miss all
this.” The Con Dubh Loop Walk is one of
his favourites as it has “maybe the quietest
places in Ireland”. We explore a rustic
graveyard of cairns and crypts, where many
inscriptions have been buffed away by time
and the elements. Interestingly, here lies
early 20th-century explorer Tom Crean, a
local lad who signed up for three legendary
Antarctic missions, including Robert Falcon
Scott’s Terra Nova Expedition (1910-13), andCLOCKWISE FROM
TOP LEFT: A ram in a
coastal pasture, Dingle
Peninsula; visitors scale
treacherous steps on
Skellig Michael known
as ‘the way of Christ’;
patchwork of fields
near Allihies on the
Beara peninsulaAt the former smugglers’ cove of Derrynane Harbour, we’re met by a
briny slap of ocean air, an excitable sheepdog and a small flotilla of
fishing boats. Somewhere out of sight is the archaeological marvel of
Skellig Michael, an island settled by a dozen Christian monks in the
sixth century and, today, abandoned to seasonal bird colonies
88 nationalgeographic.co.uk/travel
IRELAND