I went on a Friday, which turned out to be the right decision. Midweek in January there are still a few campervans parked at the viewpoint, engines idling, someone inside eating a sandwich and staring at the Atlantic through a windscreen. Friday afternoon in late January there was nobody. The car park was empty. The wind was coming in from the south-west and the light was already thinning, though it was barely two o’clock.
I left the Yaris at the top and walked down toward the cliff path slowly, the way you do when there’s no reason to hurry. The lane curved. The grass on either side was the particular flat yellow of January grass – not dead, exactly, but not convincing anyone it was alive.
The signpost at the top is still pointing to something. The place itself has moved.
1. The Blasket Islands were there when I started walking and gone by the time I reached the first bend. That is the thing about Slea Head in January – the light is unreliable in a way that feels almost deliberate, as if the peninsula reserves the right to close the view whenever it wants. I stood for a while looking at the place where the islands had been. Just cloud sitting on water, a smudge that could have been anything. The Great Blasket, Beginish, Inishvickillane – all of it folded into the haze. I’ve seen them in summer, vivid and close-looking, the kind of sight that makes tourists pull over and reach for their phones, and I understand that. But there’s something about seeing the absence of them, the grey suggestion, that feels more like the truth of the place. The islands are three kilometres off the mainland at their nearest. In January they remind you of that.
2. The cliffs at this end of the peninsula don’t shout. That sounds like nothing, but it’s worth saying because most dramatic coastline in Kerry absolutely does – you arrive at Slea Head in August with the tour coaches and the signage and the interpretive panel and everything is arranged to produce a feeling in you, and it mostly works. In January the arrangement is gone. The cliffs are just rock, dropping into green-grey water, and the sound is mostly wind and the occasional complaint from a fulmar hanging in the updraft. I stopped at the low stone wall above one of the steeper drops and watched a fulmar for the better part of five minutes. It was doing very little. So was I. We got on fine.
3. My boots were wet by the third numbered observation, which seems right. The path along here holds water even in dry spells – there are patches of short wet grass that look fine until you’re on them, and then you’re not on them so much as slightly into them. I’ve done this walk in October and in May and in June once, years ago with Donal, when we came out this way after dropping off guests in Dingle, and my boots have been wet every single time. I’ve started to treat it as part of the walk rather than a flaw in my footwear planning. The ground is soft. January in Kerry is soft. You accept it or you stay indoors.
4. There’s a stretch just past the first headland where the path dips behind a low bank and you lose the sea entirely for about three minutes. No water visible, no horizon, just the bank and the yellowed grass and a rusted bit of fencing stapled to a wooden post that’s been leaning the same direction since at least the last time I was here. I always forget this section exists, and then I’m in it and the quiet is different – the wind drops, the view disappears, and it’s just the path and the cold and the soft click of your own boots. Three minutes, maybe four. Then the bank ends and the Atlantic is back, the whole enormous grey width of it, and the Blaskets were visible again for a moment. Two of them, anyway. Then cloud.
5. The light at four o’clock in January on this part of the peninsula is a specific thing. Not golden-hour as the photography accounts on Instagram would have it, not soft-focus and warm-toned, but a kind of flattening – colour leaving without drama, the cliffs going grey, the water going grey, the sky going a slightly different grey. I stood at the top of the path near the car park and watched it happen for ten minutes or so before the cold made the decision for me. The Blaskets were fully gone. Somewhere out there the lighthouse on Tearaght was already blinking, or would be soon, though I couldn’t see it from where I stood. The first time I drove this road I was in my twenties and the peninsula felt enormous. It still does, but differently now – not overwhelming, just large in the way that January is large, which is to say it doesn’t ask you to respond.
The drive back to Stradbally took twenty-five minutes. I had the heater on full and there was still a noise under the dashboard that I’ve been ignoring since spring. The gate lifted fine when I got home, which is a lower bar than it used to be.
The kettle was on before I had my boots off.