About this ride
Day six is the one that draws people to Ireland's southwest in the first place: the Ring of Kerry, the Iveragh peninsula's great coast road, with a detour out to the Skellig Coast that most cars never take.
"Some places feel like the last solid thing before the open Atlantic. The Kerry Cliffs are one of them, with only a scatter of islands between the edge you're standing on and the far side of the ocean."
The Ring of Kerry is the most famous loop in the country, and the stretch out of Sneem shows you why almost straight away. The N70 hugs the coast west, climbing over the Coomakista Pass to a view back across a bay stitched with islands, then rolling down toward Waterville. It is a village that has punched above its weight for a long time: Charlie Chaplin holidayed here for years, and there is a statue of him on the seafront to prove it. We pulled in for coffee and scones at Beachcove, a friendly little café on the front, and could have happily stayed longer.
The road wasn't finished with us, though. A local we got chatting to insisted we not leave without seeing the Kerry Cliffs, and on this coast, when someone tells you not to miss something, you go. The turn onto the Skellig Ring and the pull up the R566 is the steepest of the day, short and sharp, and it's completely okay to walk a stretch if you need to, but the top pays it back completely. The Kerry Cliffs rise around 300 metres straight out of the sea, taller than the better-known Cliffs of Moher, and far quieter. From the edge you look out to the Skellig Islands, the jagged UNESCO-listed rocks where monks built a monastery in the sixth century and where the Star Wars films later found the end of the galaxy. It genuinely feels like the edge of the world.
Beyond Portmagee the route crosses the bridge onto Valentia Island and climbs Geokaun, at 266 metres the island's highest point, where the Fogher Cliffs fall away to the north and the view runs from the Skelligs to the Blaskets to the Dingle peninsula. Valentia has an outsized place in history for such a small island — the first permanent transatlantic telegraph cable was laid from here in 1866, briefly making it the closest Europe got to America. From Knightstown at the far end, a little car ferry crosses the channel to Reenard Point in about five minutes, a fitting last leg of a day that keeps finding water to cross.
Cahersiveen closes it out. One of the westernmost towns in Europe, it is the birthplace of Daniel O'Connell, "The Liberator", who won Catholic emancipation in 1829, and a proper market town rather than a tourist strip. A storm chased us in off the sea, which only made the evening better: pizza at The Oratory, a gourmet spot set inside St Finnian's, a church built in the 1860s, and then a pint and live music down the street at the Kerry Coast Hotel. A good place, and a good way, to end the longest peninsula on the Ring.
