About this ride
Day eight is Slea Head Drive, the loop around the western tip of the Dingle Peninsula, and the one ride we'd been looking forward to from the moment we started pedalling in Kinsale.
"Somewhere past Slea Head the road runs so close to the Atlantic it stops feeling like a road at all, and after eight days it turned out the finest of them was the one we'd saved for last."
Slea Head Drive is a loop of roughly 50 km that leaves Dingle and swings around Corca Dhuibhne's westernmost point, the last land before America. It is one of the great set-pieces of the Wild Atlantic Way, a narrow ribbon of road pinned between green fields and a wide-open ocean, and it is best ridden clockwise: out through Ventry, along the exposed south-western coast under Mount Eagle, then back over the top. Because the day is short, you can be flexible about when you set off, and Dingle itself is a lovely place to spend the hours either side of the ride.
The peninsula wears its history in the open. This stretch has one of the densest concentrations of archaeological sites in Europe, and the road passes it all at bike speed: dry-stone beehive huts, or clocháns, corbelled together without a drop of mortar and standing for well over a thousand years; ring forts and holy wells; and, on the loop back, the Gallarus Oratory, a tiny stone church still perfectly watertight after eight or nine centuries. Just past Ventry, on Aedán's family farm at Glanfahan, you can walk among a cluster of those huts and, in spring, hold the orphaned baby lambs the farm hand-rears. We stopped to meet the lambs and, as usual, stayed longer than we'd planned.
Out at Slea Head itself the view opens onto the Blasket Islands, the scatter of humps offshore that were home to a small Irish-speaking community until the last islanders were brought to the mainland in 1953. They left behind an extraordinary body of literature for a place so small, and on a clear day the Great Blasket sits close enough to feel you could ride to it. We had timed it well: the morning cloud lifted, the sun came out, and for long stretches we had the whole road to ourselves, freewheeling past Coumeenoole and Dunquin with the Atlantic crashing below.
Then the loop tips back toward Dingle, and the day, and the trip, comes full circle. Dingle is a working fishing harbour wrapped in brightly painted streets, and there is no better place to finish eight days on the bike. We rolled straight to The Fish Box on Green Street, where the seafood comes off the family's own trawler that same week, and raised a glass to a route we genuinely didn't want to end.
