I have walked up Beenoskee so many times that I stopped counting, and now I can’t remember when I stopped counting, which is roughly how it goes with things you do alone and don’t tell anyone about. Tuesday last. The light was doing what March light does on the peninsula when there’s no cloud to get in the way of it – that particular pale quality, bright without warmth, the kind that makes shadows very precise. I left the cottage just after ten, went out through the back gate, which is working now in the sense that it opens, though you still have to lift it slightly and push at the same time, and took the lane up past Tom’s before cutting left onto the track that leads to the hill.
Thirty years I’ve lived here. Thirty years of that mountain in the window above the sink. In summer, mornings, you can see the ridge from the kitchen before you’ve even put the kettle on. In November it disappears for days at a time, and you half forget it’s there, which doesn’t seem possible, but it happens. Coming back to it in clear weather – a morning like Tuesday, the sky washed out after a wet week – there’s always that small adjustment, the way you notice the size of it again.
The ridge holds snow for two days after the village has forgotten it.
The track off the lane is steep from the start. Not gradually steep, not slope-that-becomes-a-slope, steep immediately, and it stays that way for the first forty minutes, a direct climb up the lower flank through rough grass and last year’s dead rushes, the ground soft in places, solid in others, no way to predict which until you’re in it. I’ve a pair of walking boots that are older than I should admit to and they were adequate, just about. The lane was already out of sight by the time I stopped for a first rest. Below, the cottage looked small and definitively mine, the apple tree still bare, the vegetable patch a dull square of brown. The garlic I planted in October is showing the first inch of green – I could see it from up there, just about, a thin stripe of it.
I’ve been up this mountain in fog, in wind that made it difficult to think straight, in a July heat that felt wrong and slightly alarming on the Dingle Peninsula. I’ve been up it in the early years when Donal was still living at the other end of the village and we’d go together and argue the whole way about nothing of importance – the right way to make stew, whether a particular sheep belonged to Tom’s father or to the man who farmed down towards the strand. Donal doesn’t walk hills anymore, not seriously. His knee has been unreliable since 2019 and he’d rather not say so, so instead he finds reasons. When I rang him earlier in the week he asked if I was planning to go up and I told him I’d already been, and there was a pause that meant he minded slightly and wasn’t going to say so either.
‘Tuesday,’ I told him. ‘It was clear.’
‘It was lashing here all day Tuesday,’ he said.
‘I know,’ I said. And I left it at that, because there was no kindness in pressing it.
You come up over the edge of the lower ground and suddenly there’s sky on three sides, and the wind, which has been pushing at your back the whole way, shifts and comes from the northwest instead. Brandon Bay opens out below you to the north, the water a flat grey-blue on a clear day, the Maharees a narrow strip of land reaching out into it like something left behind. I stood there for a while on Tuesday and did not do anything useful.
The Blaskets were visible. This matters, and I say it plainly: there are days on the ridge when you can see the Blaskets and days when you cannot, and Tuesday was a day when you could, the islands sitting out beyond Slea Head in that slightly implausible way they have, present and separate. I wrote about Slea Head in January, the day the islands disappeared into grey water – Tuesday was the opposite of that day. Everything sharp, everything where it was supposed to be. The Dingle Peninsula stretched west below the ridge and I could trace the shape of it, the hills behind the town, the road I drove to Slea Head two months ago, the long pull of it all the way to the end.
I’ve never trusted that feeling you get on a hillside. Doesn’t stop it happening. Standing on that ridge on a Tuesday morning in late March, the Blaskets out there being visible – I was moved. I wrote nothing down. I didn’t take any photographs. I stood there for perhaps twenty minutes and looked at it and let it be what it was.
The top of Beenoskee itself – 826 metres – is another twenty minutes from where the ridge opens up, and the ground is boggier up there, less satisfying underfoot. I’ve made it to the summit cairn dozens of times. On Tuesday I stopped short of it, sat on a flat-ish rock just below the false summit, ate a cheese sandwich I’d had the foresight to bring, and looked south towards the Iveragh Peninsula – the mountains there still carrying a stripe of white along the highest ground, the same snow that had come through the previous week. From up here it’s easy to see how the peninsula you live on relates to the ones that come after it going south, the way the peninsula you live on is only the first of several, each one stepping further south into the water – Iveragh next and then Beara – and on a clear day you can pick out at least two of those ridges from here.
I walked the Ring of Beara last October. I drove it, rather. The Healy Pass in the bare October light, the same sort of sky as Tuesday but colder and with less in it. Standing on the Beenoskee ridge I could trace roughly where that was, or thought I could, the hills in that direction that might be the Caha Mountains – though I’m not certain enough of my east-from-south at altitude to say it with any confidence.
I sat up there for a good while. The wind was steady and cold, a fierce March cold, the kind that makes itself known to the backs of your hands and the tops of your ears, and after a while it was persuasive enough to get me moving. The descent is harder on the knees than the ascent, which is always the way of it, and I took it carefully on the soft ground, picking a slightly different line down than I’d taken going up. A couple of hooded crows tracked me for a while along the lower section. Tom has opinions about hooded crows that he expresses in very few words, which is how Tom expresses most things.
By the time I came off the hill and back onto the track the sun had shifted and the shadows were lying differently – you notice this in March, the way the afternoon light comes in at a lower angle than you expect, still not quite where it was in summer, and the lane gets dark before you’d think it should. Bess was sitting at the foot of Tom’s gate as I passed. She looked at me the way she does, that border collie assessment, and then looked away.
I came in through the back gate – lift and push – left my boots in the extension, put the kettle on. The cottage was the right kind of cold. The fire had been out since morning and I built it back up without hurrying, the turf dry now that it’s been stacked since November, and sat in the chair while the room came back to itself.
I’ve never written about Beenoskee before. Thirty years at the foot of it. I’m not sure I’ve been avoiding it exactly, or not consciously, but there’s something about the places that are closest that resist being written. The view from the ridge I’ve tried to put into words up there and found I couldn’t, and came home and found I could, a little, in the way you sometimes can’t access a thing until you’ve put some distance between yourself and it. Whether this counts as distance I’m not sure.
The fire’s drawing well. The mountain is in the window above the sink. I should do the washing-up.