Ring of Kerry, Part 1: Moll's Gap

Friends and work colleagues had given me a tremendous list of things to do while Natalia and I were celebrating a child-free week in Ireland. "You must see X," they would say. "It's breathtaking. And certainly, you have to see Y, too." The trouble with this advice was that there was often little agreement among people's chosen X's and Y's, and they were often in entirely different parts of the country. Surely we would be missing something not to be missed.

One trip that seemed to hold out some decent promise, though, was the Ring of Kerry, in the southwestern part of the island. The "ring" is the long, winding road that circles around the larger of the two peninsulae in County Kerry (the Dingle peninsula being the other). The Ring unofficially starts in Killarney, dips south to Kenmare, rolls west along the coastline to Waterford, turns north until Cahersiveen, and then shoots back the northern spine of the peninsula on the return trip to Killarney. The drive has become a big tourist attraction because it showcases a treasure trove of glorious scenery. But it is also not for the faint-of-heart, as the road itself--which is narrow at its widest, and a meager single lane at its slimmest--twists its way between mountains, dips through forests, and squeezes ever so tightly between centuries-old rock walls. (Oh, and drivers have to watch out for giant tour buses, too.)

I did enough research to know that the tour buses were required to go counter-clockwise around the ring, and that drivers were encouraged to go the opposite way in order to avoid getting stuck behind them. That became our plan. From our hotel in Killarney, we set off south, and soon we were rollicking along the N71, a road bounded on both sides by the trees and shrubs of Killarney National Park.

The narrowness of the roads is only part of what makes them distinct. The road also bows to the natural terrain--a very different feeling than in the U.S., where we are all too willing to uproot trees and dynamite hills in order to pave over, under, and through nature. Trees arched over the road, creating natural green tunnels. Shrubs reached out and grabbed at the passenger-side mirror during turns. Around one bend, we were greeted by a natural stone arch, just wide enough to let our car pass through. We held our breath as we passed, hoping that no other car was approaching the arch from the other side.

But the scenery--it was truly beautiful. When the trees finally gave way, we could look out onto a picturesque valley below dotted with small farmhouses, old walls, and sheep. Lots of sheep. Beyond that, the small mountain peak of Knocknapeasta rose into the clouds.

I should say that I was the passenger during this part of the trip--meaning I was the only one really capable of enjoying the sights. Natalia was too busy navigating our lovely Opel Corsa to be able to notice much. The road keeps the driver on his/her toes. Curves are sharp, and there aren't too many places where you can see more than 200 feet ahead. So while I was enjoying postcard after postcard, Natalia was telling me to enjoy it, because soon I'd be behind the wheel for some white-knuckle driving of my own.

An old church along the route.

Ladies View offers a scenic glimpse into Killarney National Park.

We were soon out of the forest and, after a couple pit stops to take pictures, we had to make our first navigational decision. The road was splitting up ahead. We could follow the road south to Kenmare, following the "official" Ring of Kerry route. Or we could follow the advice from one of my Irish-American work colleagues--someone who had recently been to Ireland and written me long emails with great insider tips--and go west, through Moll's Gap and the Black Valley. She said it was a great drive. I was keen to avoid tour buses. We went west.

"Gap," as I would learn, is an Irish way of saying "pass," and our new route instantly showed us more of the Irish countryside than we had seen all morning. Macgillycuddy's Reeks--a small mountain range--lay to the north. The claustrophobia-inducing trees from the first part of our drive had been replaced by giant pastures and scrubby hills pockmarked with small boulders. These vistas were straight out of Lord of the Rings. The overcast sky (it was still steely gray, though the rain had stopped) made the hills have a historic, ancient quality, and if I had looked hard enough, I'm sure I would have been able to see Frodo and Sam hiking along one of them.

It was along Moll's Gap that the road finally opened up for us. Not in terms of width, by any stretch--but in terms of ease of driving. With fewer cars tearing towards us around invisible bends, Natalia could enjoy the scenery more. The same was true of me in the passenger seat.

Each turn offered new stunning views. I quickly realized that my pictures would fail to convey the magnitude and majesty of this countryside, so rather than observing everything through a viewfinder, I put my camera down and just enjoyed the ride.

The rain started spitting again and the road took us along the east bank of a small valley lake. A small gravel turnoff suggested that this might be a nice place for a picture, so we stopped the car and obliged. In the U.S., some developer would surely would have subdivided and developed this land by now. Not in Ireland; the only building in sight, possibly a farmhouse, had long since been abandoned.

Lots of gray and green on our drive around county Kerry.

A few minutes later we continued our journey southwest. We saw more cows. Eventually we saw sheep among the hills too, each one's wool marked a specific color by its farmer. Here a red-dotted sheep; there a blue one. They seemed free to wander and eat as they wished.

Houses were few and far between. Again, I couldn't get over how different this was from Massachusetts, where everything seems to be overdeveloped. Perhaps rural Vermont was a more apt comparison. The houses we saw were all modest and sat right upon the road, and though we occasionally saw two homes next to each other--a sort of brother-and-sister pairing in the middle of an otherwise undisturbed scene--there were no neighborhoods, and the vast majority of homes seemed to not have a neighbor at all. It was lonely. I began to wonder what kind of work these people did (farmers, likely) and whether they ever headed into town (were there even towns around?) and why they didn't just build gigantic McMansions, since space seemed to be in high supply (I made a mental note to check local zoning laws).

As Natalia drove, I dutifully checked the map often to make sure we were headed in the right direction. Though I'm not sure why I bothered. Once we chose to take this path, there were only a handful of possible turnoffs, and we didn't take any of them. Mile after mile, kilometer after kilometer, the vistas repeated themselves, the weather stayed gray, and on the map, we slowly inched our way towards the first real stop of the day: the small town of Sneem.