Field report · Ireland
Cliffs, castles and the coast road
Four friends loop Ireland's west coast in September: Dublin cathedrals and pub music, the Cliffs of Moher, a farm full of alpacas, dolphins off Dingle, and a red-walled gallery in Kilkenny.
Ireland
Three of us had just turned forty, and we marked it by driving to the airport and getting on a plane to Dublin.
The trip was four friends who decided a milestone birthday was reason enough to leave the country. We landed in Dublin and spent our first days on foot: Christ Church Cathedral, St Patrick's Cathedral, a horse-drawn carriage clattering through the old streets, and an afternoon inside Dublin Castle's State Apartments, where the throne room and the gold ceiling of St Patrick's Hall are the kind of rooms that make you stop talking for a minute.
Then we picked up a car and pointed it west, on a loop that would take us from Dublin down toward the Clare coast, out to the Dingle Peninsula, over to Kilkenny, and back again.
“Three of us had just turned forty, and we marked it by driving to the airport and getting on a plane to Dublin.”
From the journalDublin, before the roads open up
Temple Bar earns its reputation the ordinary way, by being exactly what it looks like in photos: a red pub facade, flower baskets over the door, and a room full of live trad music most nights of the week. We ended up there more than once, including a late-night snack run at 7:43 in the evening that turned into hours, and a round of baby Guinness shots that none of us needed but all of us had.
Dublin is a good city to walk off jet lag in. It is compact enough that a cathedral, a castle, and a pub crawl all fit into the same afternoon without anyone checking a map twice.
West to the cliffs
The road out of Dublin toward Doolin runs past at least one castle stop along the way, though the exact name in our own notes doesn't match anything we could confirm cleanly, so we're leaving it as a castle stop rather than guessing at a name that might be wrong.
Doolin itself announced itself before we saw it. It smelled like stinky cheese and sea air, and the tap water had enough mineral in it that we noticed on the first glass. It is a small village built for one purpose from where we sat, getting travellers close to the Cliffs of Moher, and it does that job well.
The cliffs themselves were everything the postcards promise, minus the postcard's tendency to lie about the weather. We had a clear, sunny day for it, walked up to O'Brien's Tower, and stood at the lookout wall with the Atlantic dropping away in front of us for longer than we'd planned to.
Alpacas, a lamb, and dolphins off the coast
Somewhere on the green coastal farmland of the Dingle Peninsula, we stopped at a small farm that had clearly seen a lot of tourists and didn't mind one more carload. There were alpacas, a donkey, a baby lamb small enough to hold, and a goat with apparently no fear of tables, since it climbed onto the picnic table where we'd just set our lunch down.
From there it was a short way to the harbour and the Dingle Sea Safari, a red RIB boat that took us out on a ride that was bumpier than any of us expected. It was worth every bit of it. A few dolphins came up alongside the boat partway through, close enough to see clearly, and we came back into Dingle's colourful little harbour town soaking wet in our yellow and blue life jackets, still talking about it.
“A few dolphins came up alongside the boat, close enough to see clearly, and none of us stopped talking about it for the rest of the day.”
From the journalThe long gallery and the road back
Kilkenny Castle was our last major stop before the loop closed. The Long Gallery is the room to see there, a red-walled portrait hall that runs the length of the building, and it's a different kind of grand than the cliffs or the coast, quieter and more indoors, but no less worth the detour.
We closed out a few nights with a proper sit-down dinner, the kind with a plate that arrives looking better than the description suggested it would. By the time we were back in Dublin for the flight home, the whole loop, Dublin to the Clare coast to Dingle to Kilkenny and back, had run from the 12th to the 20th of September.
Ireland. Our own photographs from the trip.
We flew home with sore feet, a phone full of dolphin photos that mostly show splashes, and the particular tiredness that only comes from doing a country properly in a week and a half.
From the journal · The Travelling T · Went September 2024
