To Spend a Week in the Ring of Kerry

Day Eighteen: June 20^th

A modern feat of construction. The stone roof was quite amazing.

We set off in the morning to sightsee on the Dingle Peninsula before driving to the next peninsula south of Dingle, the Iveragh.  We hoped that we might at least see the Blaskets, the islands off the end of the Dingle Peninsula, if only from the road.  The fog was still quite thick and finally some islands came into view but it was not quite our hoped-for view. 

We stopped at a roadside sign for “Famine Cottages”.   These buildings have survived from the mid-1800s and were decorated with period furniture of impressive decay and miserable-looking disheveled mannequins to further the effect.  I found the framed newspaper clippings to be much more illustrative of the miseries of the time.  One hut in particular had details of the descent of a family from being a ‘cottier’ or farming family who rented land, to being given a hovel by a wealthier neighbor in which to raise their four children with only the potatoes they could grow in their own small plot for pay. 

Famine era cottages, the charity hovel is on the left

The kitchen area

A cottage kitchen in use long ago.  

Not sure who modeled for these.

I was brought to tears by the exhibit, (not the mannequins)— this surprised me.  I could just begin, in a reluctant spirit, to register the pain of these old events.  Ireland lost two million people in the period, one million to starvation and one million to emigration.  Think of the population of America right now and halve that figure.  Ireland is not even today much more populous now than in 1840 –currently about four and a half million. I am not sure if we can talk about a carrying capacity for an area what with all of our technological and medical advances but during the famine a threshold of sustainability was surpassed and then slowly recalibrated. 

We left Dingle and headed to Killarney, a mega tourist spot that we did not have any awareness of prior to the trip.  Every building seems to be a hotel or bed and breakfast, Every parking lot is full of tour buses.  Every person is eating an ice cream cone.  We discovered that our route to the southwest of the peninsula would take us through Killarney National Park.  More famously known as the Ring of Kerry, this narrow tree- and rock-bedecked road makes a circuit around the beautiful and wild-looking sites of the long headland.

The Kerry ring road is also referred to as the Ring of Terror by foreign drivers.  We did not realize that we would be going against the daily migrational pattern of oversize buses traveling the sites in a counterclockwise direction.  Having chosen the shortest route over common knowledge of this being the wrong direction, we were constantly attacked by the right side wheels of every behemoth traveling at us. We only were forced off the pavement edge once but between the overhanging rocks, the rare and beautiful biceps of old-growth trees, the temptation to actually look at the sights, the absolutely insane and seemingly worry-immune bicyclists, and the very ODD walker there was no other choice but to remain in a state of high adrenaline for about thirty miles.  With every single passing bus Steve would yell “Get back into your own lane!” I found myself dredging up something my father would say while driving when I was a child passenger.  “JESUS H. CHRIST!”  I haven’t said that in years, if ever, and can only guess it is the Catholic Church’s power in this part of the world reaching and exciting religious receptors I didn’t know had lain dormant.  There was no opportunity to take a photograph and we just wanted to get to our destination.

This was the first day of a week planned in the Ring of Kerry.  We needed to get into our rented house in time to cook dinner for seventeen gathered friends and family of Steve’s sister Alida and her husband Joe.  We are to spend a week here in commemoration of a very special person, our nephew Jevon who died at the age of thirty, three years ago, in a terrible bicycle/truck accident. This was perhaps his favorite place in the world--of which he saw much in his short life. This week would provide some real relaxation with no agenda but fun, meals, drink, playing with the youngest generation, and memories of Jevon.