Six Hundred Steps and No Handrail: The Ring of Kerry at Its Furthest Edge
Six Hundred Steps and No Handrail: The Ring of Kerry at Its Furthest Edge
Twelve kilometres out into the Atlantic, a pyramid of rock stands 218 metres out of the water — four metres taller than the sea cliffs at Moher — and near the top of it sit six drystone beehive huts that monks built in the 6th century and lived in for six hundred years.
Getting there means a small boat out of Portmagee, forty-five minutes to an hour in open water, and then the climb. Six hundred uneven medieval steps, no handrail, sheer drop on one side. The skipper confirms at the pier around 8AM whether it's happening at all, because roughly 40% of sailings are cancelled by swell.
That's Skellig Michael, and it sits at the far end of the most famous drive in Ireland.
The road that gets you there
The Ring of Kerry is 179 km of circular road around the Iveragh Peninsula, and the coaches run it anti-clockwise. Killarney, Killorglin, Cahersiveen, Waterville, Sneem, Kenmare. You go the same way, because several stretches are too narrow for a bus and a car to pass comfortably, and meeting one head-on on a hedged single-track bend is a memory nobody wants.
It starts gently. Killarney is 14,500 people and a national park at its back door — 26,000 acres of lakes and oak woodland holding Ireland's only wild red deer herd, free to walk into at any hour. Torc Waterfall drops twenty metres five minutes from a car park on the N71, and above it a hundred-odd steps climb into mossy oak wood that most visitors photograph the bottom of and leave.
Ladies View, 19 km south, is where Queen Victoria's ladies-in-waiting reportedly stood for an hour in 1861. Three lakes stack away below in tiers. It costs nothing and it's the best roadside panorama in the country.
Through the Gap
Between Purple Mountain and the MacGillycuddy's Reeks, the land splits open into a glacial defile 11 km long, with five lakes strung along the Loe river through the bottom of it.
Cars are technically able to drive the Gap of Dunloe. They shouldn't, and locals will tell you so at Kate Kearney's Cottage at the northern gate. Leave the car there. Walk it in about three hours, free, or take a jaunting car — a pony trap — for €40-60 ($44-66) per person, which is how this has been done since Victorian tourists first came looking for the sublime.
The walls close in. The Wishing Bridge sits about halfway. Sheep are on the road and entirely unbothered by you.
At the southern end, Lord Brandon's Cottage does soup and scones for €10-15 ($11-17) while open boats wait to take you through the Upper Lake, under Old Weir Bridge and across Muckross and Lough Leane to Ross Castle. The full combination runs about €60-80 ($66-88) and five to six hours, and it's the single best way to see the park.
West, into weather
Past Killorglin the peninsula narrows and the Atlantic starts showing up on the right.
Fill the tank here or in Cahersiveen — petrol is sparse out west, and many stations close by 8PM and all day Sunday. This is the practical texture of Kerry: everything is beautiful and nothing is convenient.
At Cahersiveen, 3 km down a signed lane, two drystone ring forts stand in a field. Cahergall is restored, with internal terraces you can climb; Leacanabuaile is left as it was found. Both free, both usually empty, both older than almost anything you'll see with a ticket booth.
Then Portmagee, and the Kerry Cliffs: €5 ($5.50) at a farm gate, ten minutes on gravel, and 300 metres of near-vertical rock dropping into the Atlantic with the Skelligs framed offshore. The updraught here will take a hat off your head and put it out over the ocean, which happens more than the farm gate advertises. Far fewer people than the Cliffs of Moher. On a clear evening, the better view — though an evening walk out along the Clare cliffs runs it close.
The island
If the sea allows, the boat leaves around 9-9:30AM.
You pass Little Skellig first — a second rock hosting about 35,000 gannet pairs, the second-largest colony in the world, white with birds and audible before it's close. Then the landing at Skellig Michael, and the OPW warden's briefing, and the steps.
They were cut by monks. They are uneven, worn, wet in places, and there is nothing to hold. Puffins nest in the burrows either side from April into early August and are entirely uninterested in your progress.
At the top: a monastery of drystone beehive huts, corbelled without mortar, standing since the 6th century in a place with no shelter, no fresh water beyond what they collected, and nothing between them and North America. You get roughly two and a half hours ashore.
Landings are capped at about 180 people a day, run mid-May to late September, and sell out months ahead at €120-140 ($132-154). Book it before you book the flights. Then keep a spare day, because the sea decides.
The soft southern arc
Coming back east, Kerry changes register.
Coomakista Pass climbs to a layby with Ballinskelligs Bay behind and Kenmare Bay ahead, and the light does something particular here in the late afternoon. Waterville's seafront has a statue of Charlie Chaplin, who holidayed here for years.
Derrynane is the best beach on the Ring: sheltered white sand, dunes, a tidal island you can walk to at low water, and nobody charging for any of it. Behind the dunes sits Derrynane House, home of Daniel O'Connell, the man who won Catholic emancipation in 1829 — €5 ($5.50) in, gardens free.
Five minutes inland, The Blind Piper in Caherdaniel does seafood chowder and crab claws for €15-25 ($17-28), with a beer garden and a session most summer nights.
And then Staigue. Four kilometres up a single-track lane off the N70, in a natural amphitheatre of hills, a drystone ring fort up to 2,500 years old stands 5.5 metres high, built entirely without mortar. Entry is a €1 ($1.10) honesty box for the landowner. No coaches make the turn. You will very likely have it to yourself, which is a strange thing to say about a structure that has been standing for twenty-five centuries.
Ending in Kenmare
Sneem comes first, split by a river into two colourful squares, worth twenty minutes and an ice cream at the Blue Bull.
Then Kenmare: a planned 18th-century town of painted shopfronts with the best food on the southern arc, and a Bronze Age stone circle five minutes' walk from the square. Fifteen stones around a boulder dolmen, the largest circle in southwest Ireland, €2 ($2.20) in an honesty box, and empty at eight in the morning.
Sessions in Kerry start late — 9:30 or 10PM — and they belong to the musicians, in Dublin every bit as much as here. Don't request songs. Don't talk over a slow air. Buy the players a drink rather than applauding between tunes, and you'll be treated as someone who understands.
What the Ring actually asks of you
A waterproof shell regardless of forecast, because Kerry does four seasons in an afternoon and 1,400 mm of rain a year.
Low speeds on blind bends, because the sheep are on the road and have right of way in every sense that matters.
The smallest hire car you can live with, and a hard look at the insurance excess before you fly — Irish companies frequently refuse credit-card collision cover that works everywhere else, with excesses of €1,500-3,000 ($1,650-3,300).
And a spare day. Held loose, spent on nothing in particular, ready in case the sea says no to the Skelligs on your first attempt. That day is the difference between seeing the Ring of Kerry and getting to its furthest edge.
