About this ride
Day four leaves West Cork behind for the Beara, the wildest and least-visited of the three great peninsulas of the southwest.
"Some of the evenings you never planned turn out to be the ones you keep: a pint in hand, Coulagh Bay laid out in front of you, and nowhere else you'd rather be."
The day starts gently, tracing the head of Bantry Bay north to Glengarriff. Sheltered by the mountains and warmed by the Gulf Stream, Glengarriff is almost sub-tropical, a lush little harbour village of woodland and gardens that has drawn visitors since Victorian times. It is the last proper spot for supplies before the peninsula, so we grabbed sandwiches in the village and pointed the bikes west. Beyond here the road turns onto the Beara, and the character of the ride changes completely.
The Beara Peninsula is the middle of the three fingers of land that reach into the Atlantic here, quieter and rawer than the Ring of Kerry to the north and less polished than the Mizen to the south. The Caha and Miskish mountains run down its spine like a rocky backbone, the sea is never far on either side, and the villages are small and far apart. Roughly halfway sits Castletownbere, Ireland's largest whitefish port, a proper working harbour town where trawlers unload their catch and the pubs and restaurants along the pier feed whoever comes off the water. We stopped for lunch at Lynch's on the Pier, right on the harbour, before carrying on.
Rather than ride the full outer loop around Allihies and Dursey, we cut north on a more direct road across the peninsula toward Eyeries. It was the kind of choice the Beara rewards either way: the shorter line still climbs and drops through the same rugged, empty country, all bare rock, bog and grazing sheep, with the mountains close on one side and glimpses of the sea on the other. Everyone we had spoken to promised the Beara would be the wild one, and this stretch made good on it.
Then Eyeries. Strung out on the north coast above Coulagh Bay, it is one of the most colourful villages in Ireland, a tight row of houses painted in every shade of pink, blue, ochre and green, a regular winner of the national Tidy Towns competition. We finished the day at Causkey's Bar, a small pub on the main street with a beer garden that looks straight out over Coulagh Bay to the Kerry mountains beyond. A drink, that view, and an unhurried evening we hadn't planned but were in no rush to end.
