Four Days on the Ring of Kerry: A Day-by-Day Plan

Four Days on the Ring of Kerry: A Day-by-Day Plan

The Ring of Kerry is 179 km (111 miles) of circular road around the Iveragh Peninsula, starting and finishing in Killarney. You can drive it in one long day. Most people do, and most people regret it, because the entire point of this route is the stops — exactly as it is over in County Clare.

Give it four days. Here's how they should go.

Before you start: two rules that decide the trip

Drive it anti-clockwise. Tour coaches all run the Ring of Kerry anti-clockwise — Killarney, Killorglin, Cahersiveen, Waterville, Sneem, Kenmare — and several sections are too narrow for a bus and a car to pass comfortably. Go the same way and you never meet one head-on. The Atlantic also stays on the driver's side. Start before 9AM or after 2PM to sit clear of the convoy.

Book Skellig Michael before you book anything else. Only about fifteen licensed boats hold landing permits, sailing roughly mid-May to late September at €120-140 ($132-154) per person, and they open bookings the preceding winter. Around 40% of sailings are cancelled by swell. Schedule it early in your trip so you can rebook.

Day 1: Killarney and the national park

Collect the car in Killarney or at Kerry Airport (KIR), 16 km north at Farranfore. Expect a hard sell on the collision waiver at the desk — Irish companies frequently refuse credit-card cover that works everywhere else, and the standard excess runs €1,500-3,000 ($1,650-3,300). Read the policy before you fly. Take the smallest car you can live with, not the largest; these roads are hedged and often single-track.

Check in — guesthouses on Muckross Road and New Street run €90-140 ($99-154) in summer — and walk the town, which is 14,500 people and covered on foot in an hour.

Ross Castle in the afternoon: a 15th-century O'Donoghue tower house on Lough Leane, 3 km from town along the free Ross Road path through the park. Guided tour about €5 ($5.50), free on the OPW Heritage Card.

Dinner at Bricín on High Street, which does boxty — potato pancakes with proper fillings — for €22-30 ($24-33), in a room above a craft shop the family has run since 1904.

Then a trad session at The Danny Man or Courtney's. They start late, usually 9:30-10PM, and they're for the musicians rather than the audience. Don't request songs, don't talk over a slow air, and buy the players a drink instead of applauding between tunes — the same etiquette Dublin's session pubs run on.

Day 2: Muckross, Torc and the Gap of Dunloe

Start in Killarney National Park — 26,000 acres of lakes, oak woodland and Ireland's only wild red deer herd, free and open at all hours.

Muckross House costs about €10 ($11) for the guided tour of the Victorian mansion, gardens free, covered by the Heritage Card. Queen Victoria's 1861 visit nearly bankrupted the owners, which the guides tell with relish. Muckross Traditional Farms next door, roughly €10 ($11) or combined, runs three working 1930s farms with no electricity, staffed by people who explain the machinery as if you'd just walked in off the road.

Torc Waterfall is free and five minutes' walk from its N71 car park. Climb the hundred-odd steps beside the cascade and keep going for a 4 km loop through mossy oak wood that almost nobody continues into.

Afternoon: the Gap of Dunloe. Drive to Kate Kearney's Cottage at the northern gate, 10 km west of Killarney, and leave the car — the single-track lane through the gap is genuinely unsuitable for cars in summer and locals will tell you so.

Take a jaunting car (pony trap) through for €40-60 ($44-66) per person, or walk the 11 km free in about three hours. The road climbs past five lakes strung along the Loe river between Purple Mountain and the MacGillycuddy's Reeks.

The full version continues by open boat from Lord Brandon's Cottage at the southern end, through the Upper Lake, under Old Weir Bridge and across Muckross and Lough Leane back to Ross Castle. Combined ticket about €60-80 ($66-88), five to six hours total. Lunch at the cottage is soup, sandwiches and scones for €10-15 ($11-17), cash useful, and it closes outside summer — carry a backup sandwich.

Finish at Ladies View on the N71 at golden hour, free, 19 km south. Named for Queen Victoria's ladies-in-waiting, who reportedly stood there for an hour. The three lakes stack away below.

Day 3: The western arc and Skellig Michael

This is the big day, and it's weather-dependent.

If the Skellig sailing is on: skippers confirm at Portmagee pier around 8AM, boats leave 9-9:30AM. Bring waterproofs, a packed lunch and water — there's nothing on the island. The crossing is 45 minutes to an hour in open water on a 12-passenger boat, passing Little Skellig and its colony of about 35,000 gannet pairs.

Then 600 uneven medieval steps with no handrail and a sheer drop, up to a 6th-century monastery of drystone beehive huts on a 218-metre pyramid of rock. You get roughly two and a half hours ashore, guided at the top by an OPW warden. Puffins nest here from April to early August. It is the single most extraordinary thing on the Ring and it is not close.

Back in Portmagee by early afternoon — The Bridge Bar does chowder and Guinness for €15-20 ($17-22) with live music most summer evenings.

If it's cancelled: drive Valentia Island instead, reached by bridge from Portmagee or the car ferry from Renard Point. Geokaun Mountain and the Fogher Cliffs cost about €5 ($5.50) per car for the highest accessible viewpoint on the peninsula. At the slate quarry, find the 385-million-year-old tetrapod trackway — fossilised footprints of one of the first vertebrates to walk on land.

Either way, do the Kerry Cliffs near Portmagee: about €5 ($5.50) at a farm gate, ten minutes on a gravel path, and 300 metres of near-vertical Atlantic cliff with the Skelligs framed offshore. Far less crowded than the Cliffs of Moher and, on a clear evening, the better view. Hold onto hats — the updraught is fierce.

On the way west, two stops worth the time: Kells Bay Gardens (about €12 / $13), a subtropical Victorian garden of tree ferns in a Gulf Stream microclimate with Ireland's longest rope bridge over the ravine; and the Cahergall and Leacanabuaile stone forts outside Cahersiveen, free, 3 km down a signed lane, one restored with internal terraces you can climb and the other left as found.

Lunch at QC's Seafood Bar on Cahersiveen's Main Street, €18-28 ($20-31), sourcing from the family's own boats. Best cooked fish on the western arc by a distance.

Fill the tank in Killorglin or Cahersiveen. Petrol stations are sparse out here, many close by 8PM and all day Sunday.

Day 4: The southern arc home

The gentlest and arguably prettiest day.

Coomakista Pass first: free, where the N70 climbs to a layby with Ballinskelligs Bay behind and Kenmare Bay ahead. Waterville's seafront has a statue of Charlie Chaplin, who holidayed here for years.

Derrynane Beach near Caherdaniel is the finest swimming on the Ring of Kerry — sheltered white sand, dunes, a tidal island, free. Behind it, Derrynane House was the home of Daniel O'Connell, who won Catholic emancipation for Ireland in 1829. Entry around €5 ($5.50), gardens free.

Lunch at The Blind Piper in Caherdaniel, a proper village pub five minutes inland doing seafood chowder and crab claws for €15-25 ($17-28), with a beer garden and a session most summer nights.

Staigue Stone Fort is the stop most coaches can't make. A drystone ring fort up to 2,500 years old, 5.5 metres high, built without mortar, sitting in a natural amphitheatre at the end of a 4 km single-track lane off the N70. Free apart from a €1 ($1.10) honesty box for the landowner. You will often have it entirely to yourself.

Then Sneem — split by a river into two colourful squares, twenty minutes and an ice cream at the Blue Bull — and Kenmare, a planned 18th-century town of painted shopfronts with genuinely good food and a Bronze Age stone circle five minutes' walk from the square (€2 / $2.20 honesty box, fifteen stones round a boulder dolmen, and empty at 8AM).

Home over Moll's Gap and back down past Ladies View into the park. Last stop: Muckross Abbey, free, a ten-minute walk from the car park — a roofless 15th-century Franciscan friary built round a cloister with an enormous yew at its centre.

What to budget

The OPW Heritage Card at €40 ($44) covers Derrynane House, Ross Castle, the Skellig Experience and dozens of state sites nationwide. Two or three visits break even. Killarney National Park, Torc Waterfall, Ladies View and every beach on the Ring are free regardless.

Why four days beats one

The one-day drive gives you the road. Four days gives you the 600 steps on Skellig Michael, an empty stone fort at the end of a farm lane, a swim at Derrynane, a session that starts at ten and runs past midnight, and the particular Kerry experience of four seasons happening between lunch and dinner.

Pack a waterproof shell regardless of forecast. Keep the speed down on blind bends, because sheep genuinely wander onto the N70. And leave one day loose in case the Skelligs say no the first time.