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| From My Pictures |
Dingle, along with north Donegal is about the furthest you can get from Dublin so correspondingly getting there is quite an epic journey. In order to make an early start on Saturday I had to leave work at 2pm on Friday to catch the 3pm train from Heuston station that would take me the closest I could get my rail at Tralee. Arriving at about 7.30pm this is the longest train ride in Ireland and the cause of many a complaint amongst my fellow travellers as inevitably there was no buffet due to staff shortages. The ride was pleasant enough especially as I got to chat with one of the passengers who turned out to live around the corner from where I am staying in Dublin. He was the accountant for large electrical appliance store chain in Ireland so we got to chat about IT systems and accounting. Strange that many years ago this is the career I had started out doing when I was an accountant in the military, boy how our lives have turned out differently. At Tralee I grabbed some fish and chips and waited for my bus to take me to Dingle. While waiting I got chatting to a German couple who were walking in the Kerry area and heading to Dingle to finish off their holiday. Seeing my bike they got reminiscing about the bike holiday that they had undertaken a few years earlier in Kerry and told me all about the Connor Pass that I was to tackle the next day. The boyfriend turned out to be a very keen cyclist as he cycled 60km a day to get to and fro from work, makes my 12km a day seem a trifle wimpy. I arrived in Dingle as the light was fading at 9.30pm and eventually found my B&B that I had booked the previous day tucked away on the outskirts of the town. The lovely landlady had put a pot of tea in my bedroom so I sat in bed munching a couple of digestive biscuits and watching TV.
I was up at the crack of dawn, in fact I woke up at 3am, 4am and finally at 5am I was standing at the bedroom window trying to decide if it was light enough to leave by. In the end thought what the hell and off I went into the pre dawn gloom. Dingle was quite sensibly fast asleep and didn’t notice me as I whizzed through on the way to my first part of the day which was to be spent going around Slea Head.
Pre dawn Dingle with a very faint moon over Dingle harbour.
The roads of course were completely deserted at this hour the morning and I had an extremely pleasant two and a half hours going around the very well sign posted circuit. The area is rich in archaeological sites dating back to the pre historic era. Quite remarkably some of the conical huts in use at the time have survived to this day and the ones I saw from the road looked in remarkably good shape considering their age. Seems the Irish were as good builders in those far off days as they are today though I am sure some of the buildings I saw had maybe been “restored”.
As dawn came on the outlines of the Kerry peninsular across the bay began to appear. The views were stunning.
At the end of Slea Head are a group of islands the most famous of which is Great Blasket island.
With a halo of cloud the island looked beautiful. These islands were in fact inhabited until 1953. Though it sounds romantic it must have been a bleak existence to have lived there. I find myself wondering what sort of life it must have been and romantically consider moving to a number of the many spots I have cycled past so far. But the reality of having no easy access to Tesco and at least a 6mb broadband connection soon squashes such thoughts.
This is the area where the film “Ryan’s Daughter” was filmed back in 1970 with Robert Mitchum, Trevor Howard, John Mills and Sarah Miles. A wonderful film and a wonderful area to have filmed it.
Sunrise eventually came just as I was past Blasket and though it was cloudy I was rewarded with a glorious fireball of radiant sunshine peeking over the distant mountains. Acting as a beacon it hovered over me all the way back to Dingle where I arrived at 8am just in time for breakfast. This was gratefully consumed as I had already covered some 40km and knowing that I had a fair few miles to cover today it was just what I needed to restock the energy levels. At breakfast I got chatting to a couple of American girls who were touring Ireland having just finished their finals.
The Connor Pass was one hell of a climb but not as bad as I thought it was going to be. Having had a bit of rest before attempting it I fairly shot up like a Tour De France mountain climber (dream on). At the top I awarded myself the polker dot jersey as king of the mountains and drank in the view.
With a last look back over my shoulder at the distant Kerry mountains I dropped down the other side and raced for Tralee. The road coming up had been widened, the road down to Dingle though was hard up against the mountain and wound down with some very narrow places. At one spot I reached 42mph before I cam back to my senses and slowed down after I realised the consequences of hitting a pothole or getting a puncture would result in some pretty grizzly knee grazing.
Passing through the village of Camp there was a memorial to a train accident so I looked it up on the web when I got home and found this rather interesting entry.
“The road between Killeton and Camp bends sharply at the Curraduff bridge, and just above the road bridge stands the old Tralee and Dingle Railway viaduct. As David G. Rowlands write in "The Tralee & Dingle Railway" (Bradford Barton, 1977), this line had "some of the most frightful curves and gradients ever engineered on a light railway. On Whit Monday of 1893, Locomotive Number One came off the rails and fell 30feet to the river; 3 men and 90 pigs were killed. To ease the bend here, another bridge was built in 1907 a few hundred yards upstream.
Opened in 1891, the 3-foot gauge railway, with a branch line to Castlegregory, was extraordinarily slow and accident-prone. Undulating between sea level and 680 feet (207 metres) above, trains were often stopped and sand spread on the tracks to give sufficient grip to tackle gradients. In 1939 the Castlegregory Branch was closed; in 1944 the Tralee-Dingle goods service ended, largely because of the wartime coal shortage; and from 1947 until closure in 1953 the only business was the cattle train for Dingle Fair on the last Saturday of each month. Less than a mile along the road to the east from the viaduct bridge, the water tower at Knockglassmore is all that remains of Castlegregory Junction; on the opposite side of the road Fitzgerald's, or the "Junction Bar", was much frequented by railwaymen and passengers alike and was the cause of many delays.”
The town of Tralee is somewhere I had been twice before to catch the train. Now that I was at last to arrive on a bike it all seemed a bit of an anti climax so without any hesitation I went through it and out the other side.
The road from Tralee to Tarbert was in fact very plain. The “coast” road was in fact a good few miles inland so the sea was rarely seen. So for the four hours it took me to get to the ferry it was fairly much head down and grind out the mileage. I had a very unusual lunch at “Sir Liam’s Celtic Kitchen” with Liam turning out to be a bachelor in his 70’s who had opened the restaurant in 1976 and been serving burgers and pizza ever since. Packet soup, the most weird salad made from pizza and fast food components and a pot of tea later I was ready for the open road. We did have a very pleasant chat at the end of which he most generously gave me a little Saint Christopher. I also got to listen to the quite unique local Irish radio which I had heard announced deaths. For the first time I got to hear them and was most unusual hearing about “Jimmy James from Shanagolden passed away this Friday”.
I arrived at the river Shannon just in time to catch the 3.30pm ferry across to Moneypoint. What an ugly crossing with power stations staring at each other across the river. It also started to rain so I got to commiserate with a motor biker who was also crossing with me and heading for Edinburgh via Galway. Apparently he was in no hurry and had some friends to visit on the way. An interesting chap who was part of the mountain rescue team in Kerry he certainly had some tales to tell and was a shame that we didn’t have more time to chat.
Arriving on the other side I quickly cycled in the rain to Kilkee where I made the mistake of booking into a hotel and paying twice as much as I had the night before.
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