I went on a Tuesday because the forecast said dry until two o’clock, which is as good as it gets in early November on this peninsula.
Anascaul is about twenty minutes from the cottage – you take the R560 east past Castlegregory and then cut inland, and the lake appears before the village does, which always catches me slightly off guard even though I know it’s coming. I parked in the small area near the bridge and was walking by half ten. The loop I did is not long – maybe four kilometres, a bit of height gain above the southern shore, nothing that requires anything more than reasonable boots and the sense to turn around if the cloud drops. It took me under two hours, including the time I stood still.
1.
The first thing I noticed was the colour of the water, which was a flat, dark pewter – not the blue you get in photographs taken in June, not anything you’d call inviting, but a colour that suited the day entirely. There was no wind to speak of when I started out, and the surface was still enough that the far ridge came back in it, reversed and slightly blurred, the way a reflection is always a quieter version of the thing it’s copying. I walked along the lower path first, keeping the lake to my left, before the track begins to rise. The grass was wet through despite there being no rain. November grass is like that – it holds the previous week inside it.
2.
Above the lake, somewhere in the rough ground between the path and the stream that runs down off the higher slope, I put up a snipe. Just the one. It came up fast and low and was gone before I’d properly registered it – that thin, urgent call, and then nothing. I stood for a while after that with the idea that there might be more, but there weren’t. Or if there were, they stayed down. I like snipe the way you like something you rarely see properly, which means you’re always slightly grateful and slightly unsatisfied at once. I’ve flushed them on the bog behind Tom’s field too, in October, and always feel the same afterwards: that I’ve glimpsed something that wasn’t meant for me.
The higher you go on this loop, the more the shape of the valley opens up behind you. I stopped twice on the way up – once because the view had changed enough to justify stopping, and once because my left boot had loosened and I had to crouch and retie it. Both times worth it.
3.
Somewhere above the midpoint of the climb – the path levels briefly before the final rise – I found myself thinking about the difference between a walk in summer and a walk like this one. It isn’t only the light or the temperature, though those are part of it. It’s something about who else is there, or isn’t. In July there might be four or five cars at that parking area, families, a tour bus in the village. On Tuesday there was a man walking a large dog in the opposite direction and we nodded at each other, and that was the full extent of human contact for the morning. There’s a way a landscape settles into itself in November, stops performing. I think this is what I come out for, more than the view.
The path isn’t always obvious on the upper section. There’s a point where it seems to fork and the left option looks more walked, but you want the right, which brings you up to the ridge line before looping back down. I went left once a few years ago and ended up picking my way through heather for twenty minutes before finding the line again. Grand, as it turned out, but unnecessary.
4.
The lake from above looks entirely different than from the path alongside it. Smaller, for one thing, and more enclosed – the hills around it press in closer when you’re looking down. There’s a ruined structure on the far shore that I’ve never been close enough to properly identify; it reads from the ridge as a low rectangular shape, stone-coloured, which describes most things in Kerry but this one has a particular blankness to it. I looked at it for a while. I don’t know what it was. A sheepfold, maybe, or the remains of something older.
The light was already flattening by the time I got back down – it was barely midday, and yet. The sun in November on the peninsula doesn’t get very high before it begins the long business of leaving again. I’ve noticed this more since the clocks changed. We lost the hour at the end of October and I’m still, a week on, slightly startled by the dark at half four.
5.
Anascaul village is worth the two-minute detour before you drive home. Small, quiet in November, a pub and a shop and not a lot besides – but there’s a bench by the green where I sat for five minutes and ate the two biscuits I’d brought and drank cold tea from the flask. A cat came and sat nearby and regarded me with the mild indifference cats in small villages have perfected. A lorry went past. The hills above the valley were already losing their definition in the grey.
I drove home by the coast road. The sea was the same pewter as the lake had been, which seemed right – as if the whole day had decided on a single colour and was committing to it.
The fire from Tuesday evening is still going this morning, just about, if I coax it.