I left on Tuesday morning before eight, while it was still dark enough that the lane looked like a different lane. The Yaris was cold and took a minute to settle, that noise under the dashboard already going, and I headed south towards the mountains without meeting anyone.
I’d been thinking about the Beara since the Kenmare trip, which sounds logical but wasn’t really – Kenmare just made me want to keep going south, past the point where Kerry stops being itself and becomes something else. Cork, technically. But it’s not really about the county line.
The bog up there is still deciding whether to be here.
I took the R571 west out of Kenmare after stopping for tea in a small place near the square – not the square itself, just a café on a side street with steamed-up windows and a radio on low. Barry’s, thankfully, though I didn’t ask. The woman behind the counter had the look of someone who has made a thousand pots of tea and would make a thousand more without complaint and possibly without interest, which I find reassuring in a café. I was on the road again by half nine.
The thing about the Beara Peninsula in late October is that the tourist infrastructure has quietly packed itself away. Not closed, exactly – a few things are still open – but it’s stopped trying. The signs for boat trips and heritage walks look slightly apologetic, slightly damp. The car parks at the viewpoints are empty, or nearly. I pulled in above Ardgroom on the way down and stood at the low stone wall looking out at the inlet for about ten minutes without seeing another person. Just the water and the hills going brown-green in the October light, and the sound of something moving in the gorse. I didn’t stay long because it was fierce cold with the wind off the water, but ten minutes felt right.
I’ve driven the Ring of Kerry twice, years ago when we still had guests at the B&B and Donal and I were trying to learn what we’d recommend people do. It’s grand. It’s exactly what it is. But it’s a performed landscape in a way the Beara isn’t – or not quite, not to the same degree. The Ring of Kerry knows it’s being looked at. The Beara seems less certain of this, which I mean as a compliment. The roads are narrower, the villages smaller, and in October the whole peninsula has the feeling of a place resuming a conversation that was briefly interrupted by summer.
Castletownbere was quiet when I arrived around eleven. A handful of cars outside the shops, a couple of fishing vessels at the pier, a man walking a dog along the waterfront who nodded at me in the way that people nod when you’re clearly from somewhere nearby and clearly passing through. I bought a sandwich in a small shop near the square and ate half of it sitting in the Yaris looking out at the harbour, because I’d decided I’d wait until Allihies to stop properly and then got hungry before I got there. The sandwich was fine. White bread, which is always a small disappointment and always what I get.
The drive west from Castletownbere to Allihies is the part I’d remembered least from looking at the map and the part that surprised me most. It’s only maybe twenty minutes but the road runs close enough to the water that you’re constantly catching glimpses south towards Bere Island and then swinging back inland through hedges and rough stone walls. The hedges here are different from Kerry – I notice this every time I come south of the mountains, though I couldn’t tell you exactly what the difference is. Denser, maybe. Or a different shade of going-over-for-winter. There were a few sheep on the road near a gap in a wall and I sat behind them for a while before they drifted off in the way sheep do, as if the idea of moving had just occurred to them.
Allihies. I wasn’t ready for it, is the truth. I’ve seen photographs of the old copper mine workings on the hillside above the village but photographs don’t do anything for the scale – the way the engine houses sit up on the slope in the thin October light, patient and ruined and completely without drama about it. The village itself is very small. A pub, a museum that was closed, a few houses painted in the colours that West Cork villages go in for, that particular orange and yellow and deep red that Kerry doesn’t really use. I walked up the road past the last house for a while, long enough to feel the pull in my calves from the gradient, and looked back down at the sea. The Skellig rocks were visible on the horizon, or I thought they were – two dark points in the grey. I’m not certain enough of the geography to be sure.
The copper mines stopped working in the 1880s. I read this in the small panel outside the museum, standing in the wind. Hundreds of workers, generations of families, and then nothing. The buildings left to become what buildings become. There’s a version of thinking about this that’s elegiac and a version that’s practical, and I tend towards the practical – they fell into disuse, time passed, now they’re on the hillside looking like what they are. But I stood there longer than I intended, which might be the same thing.
By the afternoon I was heading back east for the Healy Pass, which was what I’d been working towards without quite admitting it. The Healy Pass cuts up from Adrigole on the Cork side through to Lauragh in Kerry, about eleven kilometres of road that climbs to over three hundred metres and bends in ways that reward going slowly. I’d driven it once before, the year Donal moved to Cork – I went down to see him settled and came back via the Beara on a whim. That time there was a bus on the road near the top and we spent a while sorting ourselves out on a hairpin bend, the bus driver and I, both of us pretending we did this all the time. Tuesday there was no bus. There was almost nothing.
I pulled in at the top of the pass and got out of the car and the wind nearly took the door. The bog up there is purplish and brown and orange all at once, the heather well past flowering and the grass battered flat, and you can see north into Kerry on one side and south towards Bantry Bay on the other and the whole thing is so exposed it feels provisional – like the landscape is still deciding whether to be here. I took a photograph that won’t capture any of it. I usually don’t bother with photographs but sometimes you take one out of a kind of politeness.
Down into Kerry then, through Lauragh and along the Kenmare River – the estuary, though it’s called a river on the maps – with the light going already at half three in the way late October light does, not gradually but in steps, like someone turning a dimmer switch by increments. The water on my right had gone from grey to pewter to something that was almost purple. I was thinking about the letters still on the kitchen windowsill from the Kenmare trip, unstamped and unsent. I’d meant to post them the next time I was in Stradbally and had not been into the village since, which is possible when you live three kilometres outside it and are perfectly capable of inventing reasons to stay home.
I stopped for petrol in Kenmare and then didn’t stop again until I was back on the peninsula, through the mountains and back onto the roads I know. It was properly dark by Castlegregory, the headlights picking up the grass verges and the occasional cat sitting on a gatepost. I was home before seven, which surprised me – I’d been on the road all day and felt it, but the distances on the Beara are compressed in a way that doesn’t match how large the day had felt.
The fire was nearly out and took some persuading. I made tea and sat with the book I’d got in Schull, which I was getting towards the end of and hadn’t wanted to hurry. Bess had been in the garden at some point while I was out – the gap in the back gate was wide enough that she can nudge it open when she wants to, and there were paw marks in the soft earth near the vegetable patch. Tom must have been checking the sheep on the lower field.
I should go back in spring, when the fuchsia is out down there. Though I’ve been thinking that for years.