“A point comes on the fabulous Ring of Kerry when one earnestly wishes the scenery would flatten out and shut up. But it does nothing of the kind. . . Apart from the heady excitement of the big scenic shows, a succession of charming cameos keep the eye busy: stone walls running and wiggling up mountain slopes; turf-cutting scenes to left and right; near an ordinary and unornamental cottage, arum lilies growing in such abundance that they are practically wilding; farther along the roadside, children cheer and wave at the sight of a yellow bus. There is no rest in County Kerry from sights that are both lovely and interesting.”
– Stephen Rynne, from All Ireland, 1956
“Being born a Kerryman, in my opinion, is the greatest gift that God can bestow on any man. When you belong to Kerry, you know you have a head start on the other fellow. . . In belonging to Kerry, you belong to the elements. You belong to the spheres spinning in the heavens.”
– John B. Keane, in Voices of Kerry by Jimmy Woulfe, 1994
St. Patrick’s Day is just around the corner, which prompted me to do a little #TBT post on one of my very favorite places to travel: Ireland, specifically the magical County Kerry.
To a person who has spent any amount of time in Ireland, St. Patrick’s Day in the U.S. can be a particularly dreary affair – every bar suddenly decides it’s a pub, bud light gets dyed a sickening shade of emerald, and green hats and leprechaun jokes abound. Sure, as someone who has experienced St. Patrick’s Day in Dublin, I can attest that there is a lot of green and just as many boorish drunks (though they are boorish in a slightly different – and to this American, more amusing – way). But nothing about American St. Patrick’s Day celebrates the Irish culture in any meaningful way, and it always feels like a missed opportunity.
Kenmare, Not Killarney
Still, I typically do find myself reflecting this time of year of my love for the Emerald Isle. There are beautiful spots all over the country I could talk about, but as many tourists know, Country Kerry is always a good place to start. When I first visited Ireland back in 2001 with my family (my brother was concluding a study abroad semester in Cork), one of our first stops was in Kerry. We visited the breathtaking Killarney National Park and stayed in Kenmare, one of Ireland’s more cosmopolitan small towns.
Kenmare is a recommended first stop on the Ring of Kerry, which is one of those things that every tourist to Ireland seems to have on his/her agenda. But why not? As the droll mid-century Irish writer Stephen Rynne (I wholeheartedly recommend All Ireland to any Irelandophile who can get their hands on a copy) points out in the excerpt above, it is jaw-droppingly, excruciatingly beautiful. The photos accompanying this blog are those I took upon my third visit to Kerry, in 2016. My husband and I went to Kenmare from Dublin and then on to Caherciveen (and eventually to Skellig Michael, which is a bigger subject for another post).
If you visit Kerry and you’re not, say, the type of person who enjoys browsing in Carrolls Irish Gifts, I’d recommend spending little time Killarney. I’ve been to Killarney thrice now, as it’s the transportation hub within Kerry, and each time its more crowded with tourists and tourist attractions than the last. Killarney National Park is incredibly beautiful and certainly worth a visit. But once you’ve seen it (and it can be lovely to hike, if that’s your jam), it’s best to set out for one of Kerry’s many other intriguing towns.
Any Irish tourist knows that one of the best sources of news and views is your taxi driver, and I can confirm that the town of Kenmare, a mere 30-minute drive from Killarney, has the Irish taxi driver seal of approval. When we told our Dublin taxi driver we were taking the DART to Kerry, he got right to the point. “Don’t go to Killarney,” he warned making a disapproving face in the rearview mirror. “It’s full of tourists.” Feeling pleased that we must look like the “right” kind of tourists, we assured him that we were in fact headed to Kenmare. He brightened. “Kenmare is lovely!” He enthused. Thirty minutes makes a big difference.
One reason Kenmare remains lovely is that the DART doesn’t go there. The train goes to Killarney, and you find your way from there. We ended up calling a taxi number posted to a dusty bulletin board in the train station, and soon we were riding with Dermot, who not only drove us through Killarney National Park but insisted upon stopping at Ladies’ View so we could take photos. Dermot told us he had never even been to Dublin. He was born in Kerry and in Kerry he stays. Looking around, who could argue with him?
Kenmare is indeed a beautiful town with a number of charming B&Bs (the two I’ve stayed in – both stellar – are the Brass Lantern and Ashfield). The town has your usual host of pubs, seafood restaurants and knitwear shops, but its most interesting historical attraction is the Bronze Age Stone Circle just at the edge of town. Inside the circle, it’s incredibly peaceful. I felt like I could stay for hours.
Kenmare is an excellent first stop before really embarking on the Ring of Kerry, as it’s a fairly happening town. You get your fix of civilization before preparing to go further out. Many tourists do “The Ring” in the same way: they take a tour bus or drive, hitting all the main towns in a day. But I don’t usually go in for that kind of fast-paced tourism and besides, we had a Skellig Michael adventure planned that necessitated us making our way to the coast. So we headed to Caherciveen, one of the western-most towns on the ring. We rode the (surprisingly prompt) Bus Éireann through some of the most awe-inspiring landscapes there are, and made our way to the tiny western village.
Caherciveen, Where “the People Are as Clever as Pet Foxes”
In All Ireland, Stephen Rynne doesn’t spill too much ink on Caherciveen, except to say: “It is an end-of-the-world town with an excellent hotel, and of course all the people are as clever as pet foxes” (102). It remains a pretty accurate description from what we gathered. At first, we marveled at the seeming emptiness of the town. The only people we seemed to spot around were groups of Spanish students, upon whose rowdiness any Irish proprietor we met seemed to comment disapprovingly. No one explained what they were doing there (on holiday?) but they lent an air of youthfulness to an otherwise quite elderly town, and seemed perfectly pleasant to us.
On our last night in town, however, we saw Caherciveen come to life: we stopped into what was supposedly the town’s best restaurant, an elegant seafood bistro. We were surprised to see the place filled up over the course of the night with cosmopolitan-looking people of various ages, many of whom seemed to know one another, drinking wine and laughing and talking and having a great old time. The little town wasn’t so quiet after all.
Caherciveen (which we learned, after listening closely to a number of taxi drivers, is pronounced “CAR-siv-een”) is a town of a few blocks that dissolves into some of the most beautiful country I’ve ever seen. Water, mountains, wildflowers, and big, fluffy clouds – it’s all there.
One of Ireland’s many incredible old castles, Ballycarbery, is within about a 45-minute walk to the village. We lucked out with beautiful weather and made the journey (see the top image for full effect).
This is the problem with writing a blog – it’s got to come to a close sometime, but there are certain subjects about which one feels inclined to go on and on. Kerry is one of those. If you’re taking a trip to Ireland, visit this beautiful place. But I’d recommend avoiding the typical hop-on-the-bus, see-a-town-for-10-minutes method. I personally have been to Kerry three times now, and I still haven’t even seen all towns on the ring. But I know this: each and every town has its own special quirks and surprises. So why not just pick one and go?
There are two tiny memories that come to my mind when I think of Kerry: one I saw from the window of the bus Éireann on my last visit, as we rolled through one of the northern towns – either Glenbeigh or Killorgan. It was a lazy Sunday, and I watched a white-haired man emerge from a shop with a newspaper in hand. As he walked down the street, he was greeted by passers-by – clapped on the shoulder, waved to, chatted with. It was a slow, sunny, cool day in Kerry, and nothing could seem more perfect.
The other memory didn’t even take place in County Kerry. I was on a ferry heading to Clare Island in County Mayo as I watched a little boy bend to pet a handsome Irish Setter. “He’s lovely,” the boy said to the dog’s elderly master. “What’s his name?”
“Kerry,” the man said.
The little boy looked up, surprised. “I was born in Kerry,” he said.
The older man smiled at the boy. “So was I.”
I’ll leave you with some more from Stephen Rynne:
“In the nineteenth century, Kerry was already fashionable; in the twentieth century it is almost riotously popular. The ink nearly dries on my pen at the thought of how it is over-written, over-romanticized and now almost overrun. The tens of thousands who have admired its scenery imagine that they know Kerry; so they do—from the outside. There remain the people. ‘Kerry brains’ are proverbial and, if anything, the people of this country outmatch their scenery in the variety and unexpectedness of their intellectual gifts” (107).
