The Dingle Peninsula (08-30-19)

Along the way to Dingle: We stopped at the small town of Listowel, to look at an old tower castle. 

It was interesting to see this relic in the middle of a modern town.

Built in 1303, only 1/3 of it is left.  It fell into disrepair in the 1700s, and was bought by the Hare family- but they never lived in it.  Whoever owns the castle owns the title of Earl of Listowel, and that's what the family was after.

In the 1800s the church of Ireland used the stones to build their church and a few years later the Catholics used more of them to build their church.

Our cottage on Inch Beach has a great view of the bay, and we were lucky enough to have good weather for an hour, so we could sit out and enjoy it.

That was pretty much it for good weather for a while so we decided to suck it up and walk the beach in the rain, the following morning.

Done with our walk, it was time for a drive. We took Slea Head Drive around the peninsula to the western most point of Europe .

It is here that the first transatlantic telephone cable was run to Newfoundland and where they say the “next Parish over is Boston".

There are several sites to see along the way, some more of interest than others. There were two places where scenes from Star Wars was filmed but the heavy fog kept us from seeing them .

Off the point lay the Blasket Islands. 

Populated by fewer than 200 people, they were pretty isolated from the mainland, with their only method of reaching it being small boats they made themselves. 

Being isolated, their language was more pure Irish, and in the early 1900s

Scholars started coming  from all over to learn Irish from the islanders.

In the 1940s,  most of the young had left for America, having heard about how great it was (many of them landed in Springfield, MA). The oldest daughter would go first, as she had work experience and was able to save money. Once established she would save enough for another passage and send it home for the next sibling. That one in turn would work to save for the next sibling's passage, and so on, until so many were gone, the island could no longer sustain itself .  In 1953 it was abandoned and the inhabitants moved to the mainland.

Nearby Killarney National Park is Ireland's first national park, created in 1932 when the Muckross estate was donated to the Republic of Ireland.

It has some of the oldest woodlands still existing in Ireland.

We walked for about 3 miles in those woodlands, around a lake, then took a boat back to the Muckross House.

Our boat driver highly entertaining telling us 
stories and joking with us about where we were from.







 At the end he said he would tell people about us saying we were a foursome traveling the world looking over our shoulder trying to stay ahead of the grim reaper. He was born in Boston but left at age 2. He wore a New England Patriots hat as a child but had no idea what they were, and played with a hockey stick but had never seen a hockey game.

The nightlife in Dingle had us wishing we had stayed in the city itself, or at least within taxi distance, but as it was, we had to have a designated driver.  Paul took one for the team, so to speak.

The fun pub was the one that was in an old hardware store, with musicians playing behind the counter, but the better music was across the street at the Dingle Pub.

Not wanting to drive in the dark, we made it an early night.







Before we knew it, it was time to move on to our next destination- the small town of Emly.

Along the way: We stopped in Foyne, at the Flying Boat and Maritime Museum.  This small museum, which showcases the "flying boat"  is really neat, and has an interesting benefactress- Maureen O'Hara.  She was born in Dublin, and her husband was the first Lead Pilot for Pan Am Airlines, the first US airline to fly a transatlantic route.

These flying boats were bigger than land planes because it was easier to land on the water, but by 1946, technology had advanced enough that large planes could now land on a runway, and these planes became obsolete.

During WWII, commercial flights from the U.S. to Ireland landed in Foyne, and although Ireland was neutral, the Irish shared intelligence with the Allied forces, and the weather experts here were instrumental in providing weather information during the invasion of Normandy.