A travel blog of Ireland, Europe, and New Zealand

This is a famous tourist route on a peninsula in the west of Ireland. By now, the tourists are starting to decline in numbers so we went for a Monday to Friday visit last week with our daughter Sarah, son-in-law Chris and our two grandsons Angus aged 5 and Dominic aged 2, who normally live in Hove on the south coast of England.

View from the house – sun catching just the houses

The house at Killorglin

We had planned to take the train to Killarney and hire a car locally but the day we had booked to go down there turned out to be a day that the rail staff were on strike so we had to amend our plans and drive from Dublin, which is about a 300 km journey. Sarah had found us a house to rent in Killorglin through website AirBnB, which turned out to be ideal for our needs – modern, plenty of bedrooms and bathrooms and a wonderful conservatory at the front which looked out over rolling Irish countryside and the mountains beyond. (Click on these photos to enlarge them.)

The weather gave us a bit of everything from heavy rain to sunshine but most of the time was fine for our purposes. In one day the weather can (and did!) change several times but the combination of the sun alongside often quite black clouds produced a marvellous soft and luminous light. You will see a bit of it in some of the photos but it is difficult to reproduce.

We had to do the Ring of Kerry in just one day although you probably need several days to see everything it has to offer, so Pip and I will return here, possibly next year in the spring, to give it a bit more attention.

The photos have been split into two groups – touristy and family. Both Pip and I remarked on how much one of the Kells Beach photos reminds us of a well-known Rita Angus painting called “Boats, Island Bay”, a print of which used to hang in my parents’ house in Napier.