About this ride
Day three trades the Mizen for Sheep's Head, the least-visited of West Cork's five fingers of land.
"Some of the best days on a bike are the ones you find by accident, on a road nobody thought to tell you about."
From the cabin at Goleen the road tips straight up into the hills of the Mizen, the sea falling away below as you climb and the whole peninsula opening out behind. It drops you at Durrus, a tiny village at the exact point where the Mizen and Sheep's Head peel apart into the Atlantic. Durrus is best known for the washed-rind farmhouse cheese made in the valley above it since 1979, and it makes a handy last stop for supplies. West of here the roads get quieter and the map gets emptier.
That emptiness is the whole point of Sheep's Head. It is the smallest and narrowest of the region's peninsulas, a long ridge of land between Bantry Bay and Dunmanus Bay that most visitors skip in favour of the busier Ring of Beara or Ring of Kerry to the north. Their loss. The reward for turning down it is constant ocean on both sides, single-track lanes threading between stone walls and open moor, and a stillness that is genuinely hard to find on a road bike anywhere. It was one of our favourite days of the whole trip. Halfway along, a hand-painted sign pointed us up a side road to the Heron Gallery in Ahakista, a garden café and art gallery where we took a chance it would be open, and it was: excellent pastries eaten among the flowerbeds, exactly the kind of place you hope to stumble on.
From there the peninsula gives back everything the climbs earned, long sweeping descents with the water spread out below and nothing to think about but the road. The line curls back east along the shore of Bantry Bay and rolls into Bantry itself, a proper harbour town at the head of the bay, big enough for a good feed and a choice of pubs after a long day in the open. We found a table, called it a night, and left the far end of the peninsula for another trip.
