About this ride
Day seven crosses from the Iveragh peninsula to the Dingle peninsula, and takes in one of Ireland's newest cycling trails: the South Kerry Greenway, a railway line reborn as a bike path.
"A hundred years ago this was a railway carrying farmers and fish to market. Now it's a smooth, car-free ribbon along the edge of Dingle Bay, and riding it feels like being let in on a secret."
For sixty-odd years the line from Killorglin out to Valentia Harbour was the most westerly railway in Europe, hauling passengers, cattle and mail along the south shore of Dingle Bay from 1893 until it made its last run in 1960. The tracks came up, but the corridor stayed, and it is now being rebuilt piece by piece as the South Kerry Greenway. A little way out of Cahersiveen we rolled onto the newest sections, some of the first people to ride them, and they are a joy: a gentle, mostly car-free grade with the water on one side and the mountains on the other, threading the restored cuttings and stone viaducts the old engineers left behind. The Gleensk viaduct alone is worth the trip.
Most people meet the Ring of Kerry through a coach window. On a bike you get the version the road can't give you, the smell of the gorse, the sheep on the verge, the way the light moves across the bay, and you have the time to stop for it. We pulled off in Glenbeigh, a small village under the Seefin hills near the long sandspit of Rossbeigh strand, and found Kev's Shed, a friendly little coffee stop where we sat out on the patio by the water with pastries and flat whites and were in no rush to leave.
From Glenbeigh the route runs on to Killorglin, the goat-crowning capital of the annual Puck Fair, and then leaves Iveragh behind to cross onto the Dingle Peninsula, Corca Dhuibhne, one of the strongest Gaeltacht areas in the country where Irish is still the everyday language. This is a good place to top up supplies before the peninsula's south coast, which runs past Inch Strand and Annascaul with shops and cafés thin on the ground, even if you never lose phone signal. The road stays fairly busy until the first climb thins the traffic out, and after that it opens up into the big sea views the trip has spoiled us with.
Dingle, Daingean Uí Chúis, is the reward at the end, and the biggest town of our whole tour. A working fishing harbour wrapped in a maze of brightly painted streets, it packs in more good pubs, restaurants and craft shops than a town its size has any right to. We went straight for Murphy's Ice Cream, made in the town from the milk of local Kerry cows, then wandered into O'Flaherty's on Bridge Street for a pint and a trad session, the kind of easy, music-filled evening you plan a whole trip around. It is a place worth staying put in, which is exactly what we did, for two nights.
