About this ride
Day five leaves the Beara for the Iveragh peninsula and the most famous road in the southwest, the Ring of Kerry, on the way to the knot that ties it together: Sneem.
"You start the morning on bare Beara rock and finish it soaking in a barrel of seaweed with the tide going out. Somewhere in between, the whole country seems to change under your wheels."
The first stretch is a study in contrasts. The Beara begins as it always does, all bare rock, bog and grazing sheep, then softens as the road works east and north toward the head of the bay. Barren hillside gives way to sheltered, almost sub-tropical woodland, thick with rhododendron and fern, before opening out again for the run into Kenmare. It is the kind of morning where the landscape keeps rearranging itself, and you spend as much time looking around as looking at the road.
Kenmare makes a natural lunch stop, and it is one of the loveliest towns in the region to break the day. Its name comes from the Irish Ceann Mara, "head of the sea", for its position at the top of Kenmare Bay, and it sits at the meeting point of two of Ireland's great loops, the Ring of Kerry and the Ring of Beara. It is an old town with a Bronze Age stone circle a short walk from the main street and a reputation for good food, laid out on a neat triangular plan of colourful shopfronts, craft shops and cafés. We stopped at Bean and Batch for sandwiches and took a while to enjoy the place before pushing on.
North of Kenmare the road tilts up for the day's one real climb, the long haul to Moll's Gap. At around 260 metres it is the highest point on the Ring of Kerry, a mountain pass on the old Kenmare-to-Killarney road named for Moll Kissane, who ran an illicit poteen stop here while the road was being built in the 1820s. The climb is steady rather than savage, and the reward at the top is one of the great views in Ireland, out over the MacGillycuddy's Reeks, home to Carrauntoohil, the country's highest mountain. From there the route turns west and rolls down through open moorland toward the coast.
The day ends in Sneem, one of the most photographed villages on the Ring of Kerry. Its Irish name, An tSnaidhm, means "the knot", and there are as many stories about why as there are colours on its houses: the swirl of the river as it meets the tide, the little bridge tying its two village squares together, or simply that you cannot complete the Ring of Kerry without passing through it. Whatever the reason, it is a immaculately kept row of pinks, blues and yellows on the estuary, and a fine place to roll to a stop. We finished ours a little way outside the village, at the Sneem Hotel on Goldens Cove, where the best view of the day was waiting through the window of our own room.
