I booked it on a Tuesday, two weeks out, because the soda bread had defeated me for the third time that month and I needed to be somewhere I hadn’t made a mess of anything. That’s not entirely true. I’d been thinking about Dingle in November for a while – the way the town goes quiet after the October bank holiday and becomes something more like itself – and the bread was just the final nudge. I threw what was left of the third failed loaf in the compost, rinsed the bowl, and went to look at guesthouses online. The bread eventually came right, but the booking was already made by then.
Five nights. Thursday to Tuesday. The drive is twenty-five minutes from the cottage, which made packing feel slightly absurd, but I packed anyway. One bag. The novel I’d been meaning to get to – John McGahern’s Amongst Women, which I’d read before, years ago, teaching it briefly in the early nineties before the curriculum moved on and I never went back. I’d been meaning to reread it since the summer. I brought it with the intention of finally doing the thing.
I left on a Thursday morning, late enough that the mist was still low on the hills coming over the Conor Pass.
The sheep above the first lake don’t move until the very last second.
The town was quiet when I arrived. Not empty – there were people, there were cars – but quiet in the way a room is quiet after a party has cleared out and someone’s opened a window. A few of the cafés along the main street had reduced their hours. Two or three shops had signs in the windows saying back in March or closed for November with no further explanation, as though November needed none. The harbour was grey and still. A couple of boats. A man fixing something on the pier wall that I couldn’t make out from where I was standing, and didn’t go closer to ask.
I dropped my bag at the guesthouse – a narrow house above the harbour, run by a woman in her seventies who said very little and had the heating on, which I was glad of – and went straight out again.
The light, what there was of it
November light on the Dingle Peninsula is a specific thing. Low and white and not unkind, but honest in the way of someone who’ll tell you the price of something before you’ve asked. By three in the afternoon it was already thinning. By half four it was done. I had an hour and a half of decent light each day if I was organised about it, which I wasn’t always.
I walked the headland on the Friday morning, out past the old church site above Ventry direction, up onto the grass where the path gives up and you’re left to decide your own route. There was nobody else. Wind off the Atlantic, not vicious, but persistent – the kind that doesn’t gust so much as push, steadily, as though it has somewhere to be. I walked for two hours without seeing another person, only a few crows and one heron standing in a wet field below the path, entirely motionless, waiting for something I couldn’t identify.
On the Saturday it was clearer, briefly. I walked out along the harbour in the early afternoon and looked west. The Blaskets were visible – I could see the Great Blasket, the ridge of it dark against the lighter grey of the sky, and Beginish closer in. They look further than they are, or maybe as far as they are, I’ve never been sure. There’s something about the way they sit out there in November that feels different to how they look in summer, when there are boat trips and visitors and the whole thing becomes a day out. In November they just look like what they are – an island that people left, and the sea between you and it.
I stood there for longer than I needed to. A woman walked past with a small dog and nodded. I nodded back. That was the extent of my social life on Saturday afternoon.
The evenings
The evenings were the best of it. I’ll say that plainly. I’d been a bit worried about five nights alone in a town I know well but don’t live in, the stretch of time after dinner when you’re neither tired enough for bed nor animated enough for company, but it turned out to be fine. Better than fine.
I found a pub off the main street – small, dark, not set up for food in the evenings in November, a few stools along the bar and a table or two – and I went there most nights. A glass of Guinness. Sometimes two. The Amongst Women propped against my glass. The barman left me alone, which is the right disposition toward a person reading in a pub, and the other customers, when there were any, were local or at least wintering, and had no interest in me whatsoever.
McGahern is not comfortable reading. I’d forgotten that. The prose is so controlled it makes you aware of what it’s doing, the way the seasons in the book repeat and compress and Moran’s presence fills every room even when he isn’t in it – and I found myself reading more slowly than I usually do, stopping to go back a page, not because I’d lost the thread but because I didn’t want to burn through it. I had the time. That was the whole point of going.
I finished it on Sunday night, sitting in the same pub, the last twenty or thirty pages in one go, and then I sat for a while with the book closed and the glass empty and thought about very little. The barman topped up my glass without being asked, which I took as an act of kindness.
I’d brought nothing to read after that. I should have anticipated this – the Schull book had gone the same way, finished in two evenings in October, and I’d ended up reading the back of the cornflakes box for want of anything else. Monday evening I had a long look at the small bookshelf in the guesthouse sitting room: a thriller with a broken spine, someone’s left-behind holiday read; a book about the history of the Dingle Peninsula that I’d looked at before; and a slim volume of poems by someone I didn’t know. I took the poems. Sat with them for an hour. They were fine. They were more than fine, actually – quiet and coastal and paying attention to small things – but I hadn’t written down the name by the time I left and I’ve since forgotten it, which I’m annoyed about.
What the town was like, really
I want to be honest about this: Dingle in November is not a secret. People know. There are other off-season visitors, there are locals going about their business, there are workmen in high-vis jackets eating sandwiches outside the newsagents. The town isn’t transformed into some stripped-back, authentic version of itself just because the coach parties have gone. It’s still a town with good restaurants and a tourist infrastructure, and that infrastructure doesn’t entirely disappear – it just goes quiet, slows down, shows its elbows.
But that quietness is real and it does something. The streets are wide enough to walk in without stepping around anyone. You can stand on the pier and look at the water for ten minutes without feeling you’re in anyone’s way. The restaurant I went to on Saturday evening – the only night I’d made any kind of effort – had four other tables occupied. The woman at the table nearest me was reading the weekend supplement, slowly, folding each page back carefully as though it mattered. The couple near the window talked in low voices throughout the meal. Nobody was performing anything.
I ate fish. Hake, simply done. A glass of white wine that was better than I’d expected. Bread in a small basket that rose properly – I noticed this, couldn’t not notice it, given the week I’d had before I came. I ate the whole basket.
I walked back along the harbour after dinner. The boats were lit, the water was black, and it was cold now, a proper November cold that had been gathering since the afternoon. I thought about the coat I’d seen in a shop window in Kenmare in October and still not bought. I thought about it for approximately thirty seconds and then thought about something else.
On Monday I drove out toward Slea Head – not all the way around, just out and back, an hour in the car. The road along the southern edge of the peninsula in November is quiet enough that you can stop in the middle of it and look at the sea for a minute without inconveniencing anyone. I stopped twice. The Atlantic was dark green, the waves coming in long and even from the southwest. It had rained that morning and everything was shining. The fuchsia in the hedgerows is stripped back by this point in the year, the flowers long gone, and what’s left is just the dark wiry stems and a few leathery leaves, fierce and stripped and still somehow holding on.
I drove back into town, had a bowl of soup in a café near the car park, and sat there for an hour reading nothing, looking out the window at the street.
That was Monday.
I drove home on the Tuesday morning in light rain. Took the Conor Pass because I always take the Conor Pass, visibility poor above the first lake, the mountains grey and close. Came down into Stradbally just before eleven. Let myself in the back – the gate stuck as usual, I had to lift and push simultaneously, which I’ve been doing for so long now it’s automatic – put the kettle on, stood in the kitchen in my coat for a moment before I remembered to take it off.
The snowdrop bulbs were still on the windowsill where I’d left them in October. Still in the paper bag. I put them to one side and filled the kettle.