The Ring of Beara

One day, we drove the "Ring of Beara," a 195 km loop around the Peninsula (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beara_Peninsula), and visited sites along the way. See tourist map below. This ring is much less traveled than the well-known Ring of Kerry. In fact, it barely makes some tour books. But, we thought that it was really beautiful. The scenery was very brown and grey, with bedrock and brown grasses dominating the landscape. The roads were narrow, twisty, and dotted with tunnels. We saw MANY signs for archaeological sites (note the brown symbols on the map below), and lots of sites aren't even marked. It felt like we could have spent a month exploring the Peninsula and still not seen everything. We never made it to a playground or a beach on the Beara Way, even though we saw some gorgeous ones (marked in yellow on the map below) and had planned on doing both. 

We started at Knockatee around 10am, which is near the town called Tuosist on the map above, went east on R571 to N71 south to Glengarrif, to R572 west to the very point of the Peninsula, then back to Knockatee heading east on R575/571. Thanks for all the great driving Jubin!

 Below are pix of some of the places we stopped along the way. Really, we probably saw only 25% of the sites! Gorgeous.

This was a random beautiful spot off of N71 - first pic of the day!

Our first extended stop was Bonane Heritage Park (marked on N71 on the map above; http://www.bonaneheritagepark.com/), where they let us drive up close to the sites so that Mom could be with us. There is a ring fort, famine houses, a stone circle, a fulachta fidah (Bronze Age cooking pit; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulacht_fiadh), a bullaun stone (stone with a water-filled depression; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullaun), and a monolith (standing stone; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menhir) - all close together with trails between them!  

While standing at the stone circle, Watson noticed these 2 Red Deer does - good eyes!
Deer are NOT very common in ROI/NI - these are the 1st we've seen all year. 

More info about Red Deer here: http://www.wilddeerireland.com/reddeer.html

Watson's face here was him saying something like
"but, it is so small...I thought they were big!"

There were a bunch of rock tunnels along N71 too - this was the road that we accidentally took on our first night when we were trying to get to Knockatee House. Cool during the day, not so much late at night after a long day!

Right before Glengariff, we stopped at Gelngariff Nature Reserve (http://www.glengarriffnaturereserve.ie/) for a picnic lunch. Was a perfect spot for it! Unfortunately, I didn't get any pix there, but it was really nice - picnic tables, woods, and a beautiful stream for the boys to play in. Unfortunately, no bathrooms...It certainly felt like we spent a lot of time during these 2 weeks searching for HC accessible bathrooms! Not the easiest to come by...

At the very tip of the Peninsula, you can take this cable car (seats 7) across to Dursey Island - so cool! We wanted to do the trip, but all of the return trips were booked until 7pm, so we would have had to wait 4 hours to get back...and, the island basically has nothing on it except hiking trails. Not this time around! But, we had a really nice time here, viewing the scenery and wildlife.

We still aren't sure what exactly we were watching in the Sea there...whale? Orca? Shark?
Whatever it was, it was very large! And, it hung out for a long time while we watched. 

Random ring fort - so neat... In the pic below, it is in the background.

This is what the road looked like - narrow, right along the edge of cliffs and hills.
In the pic below, the same road starts in the left-hand corner and goes along into the middle of the pic.

On the way back to Knockatee, we passed MANY places we wanted to explore...But, we had all had enough. Signing Time was playing in the back, Watson and my Mom were sick of being in the car, and Jubin was sick of driving.