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Day 9 Itinerary
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- Dingle
Day 9 Impressions
The Ring of Dingle - Reagan
As Jen and I began walking the 2km back to our B&B from Dingle Town, we happened across our driver, who offered to give us a lift up. On the way, he asked "Your father is Michael, the deacon, right?" "Yes," I replied, and he said "I told him yesterday I'd take him to see the Gallorus church, the oldest church in Ireland - it looks today as t did when it was built." I told him I'd relay that, and when we got to the B&B I found my father. He was putting on sunscreen getting ready to go to the beach, about 4km away. When I told the driver this, he offered to drive us, and told my father again about the church. Seemingly determined to show it to him, he also offered "There's a beach nearby, where Ryan's Daughter was filmed." My father was not terribly excited, but we're a fairly polite group, and I suppose that we weren't quite forceful enough in our rejection of the idea.
The rest of the group wondered as the beach they had planned to visit receded further and further into the distance, but still our driver pushed on. Finally, after going through on the tightest hairpins I'd ever seen, we reached the stopping point for the beach. We stayed for a little while, playing in the surf, watching dolphins, and playing hurling. We climbed up the hill (nothing after Skellig Michael) and set off for home. As we rounded the tip of the ring of Dingle, the distance to Dingle Town began to decrease. Then, signs for the Gallorus Oratory appeared, and we turned away from the main road.
We stopped by a house with a small campgrounds in back, and our driver, knowing the man who lived there, went to fetch him. When he came back, he had in tow an older man, who he introduced as a tour guide and foremost scholar of the Dingle Peninsula. He offered to give us some history of the oratory and suggested we not enter the main way, but rather look for the back entrance to avoid paying the 3 euro a person entrance fee. He said he'd get his car and meet us there.
Five of the thirteen of us joined the driver down the very narrow road with high hedges on either side. None of us were terribly comfortable with the ides of sneaking in, but it certainly beat paying for admission. Worse, we all expected the tour guide we'd just met to be waiting by the oratory to give us a perfunctory history of a site we didn't even care to visit and then expect a tip for his trouble.
We turned down a small cow path with an unlocked gate, and wandered past cows, electric fences, and barbed wire. We finally arrived, and just as we did, the proprietor stepped out with tickets for us to buy. The driver, seemingly embarrassed that he'd made the wrong turn (for neither the first nor the last time on this holiday), purchased the tickets. We walked a few hundred yards to the oratory, looked briefly around, made friends with a small orange tabby cat with a bum back left leg, and headed out, no sign of the tour guide. We quickly saw that our driver had jumped the gun, and that the path we'd wanted was the next one down, and as we reached the end we saw that it was actually a public right-of-way, meaning that going down that was wasn't sneaking in, but rather just avoiding the 3 euro admission charge. More than anything, though, we felt somewhat kidnapped - we had no particular desire to visit the church or any beach other than the nearest one, but it seemed we had no real say in the matter.
Connor Pass - Mike
Shawn, Reagan and I rode with the bus driver to Connor Pass, reported to be the highest road in all of Ireland. The view was just spectacular. We also climbed one of the hills to get a better look and ended up face to face with many, many sheep. Of course there are twice as many sheep in Ireland as there are people so seeing sheep in not at all remarkable. Getting close enough to get good pictures of them is.Dingle Bay - Shayla
After dinner we walked down the pier to the bay. Dingle was one of Pappy's favorite places so we decided to do something in memory of him. After the sons said a few words Libby and I threw one of Pappy's men and a horse into the bay. He will now live forever in Dingle Bay. It is also going to be cool to back someday and know that a piece of him is always in Ireland.Day 9 Photos
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