West Cork is not a casual trip from Stradbally. The drive down through Killarney and out past Kenmare takes the better part of the morning even on a good day, and by the time you cross into Cork you’ve already committed. I don’t go often. But I’ve been enough times, over the years, to have a small list of places I’d stay again without hesitation – and February feels like the right month to write about them, when the thought of the Mizen coastline in that pale winter light is enough to make you want to go.
These aren’t recommendations in the formal sense. I’m not a travel writer. I don’t take notes at breakfast or count how many hooks are in the bathroom. I notice things the way any guest notices things: slowly, and mainly in retrospect. What I can say about each of these places is simple: I slept well, I wasn’t uncomfortable, and I thought about them afterwards. For a B&B, I think that’s enough.
1.
The first one is a farmhouse a few kilometres outside Bantry, set back from the road on a slight hill with a field in front and the bay visible if you lean a little to the left from the bedroom window. I stayed there two nights in autumn, a few years back, before Donal had moved to Cork and before we’d properly wound down the B&B ourselves. The woman who ran it was in her seventies and gave no particular fuss. Breakfast was porridge if you wanted it, a full fry if you didn’t. The dining room had a low ceiling and one of those radiators that clanks when it first heats up, which I found oddly comforting.
What I remember most is that she’d put a hot water bottle in the bed. Didn’t mention it, didn’t make an occasion of it. You pulled back the cover and there it was. I know that sounds like a small thing. It isn’t. After years on the other side of that transaction – watching guests arrive cold and tired from the road – I know exactly how much thought that takes, and how often it doesn’t happen. I’d go back to that farmhouse on the strength of the hot water bottle alone.
2.
The second is a terraced house in Skibbereen, three rooms, run by a man who also worked at the credit union during the week. I found it by accident: I’d originally booked somewhere else and they’d had a leak or a burst pipe or some such thing, rang me the night before to say sorry, and sent me on to this place instead. I arrived not expecting much.
The room was small and looked out onto a back yard with a plastic chair in it, and the bed was the kind that sits very high off the floor, which I always find peculiar. But the breakfast was better than anything I made for guests at Beenoskee – brown bread he’d baked that morning, proper butter, a pot of Barry’s that was still warm when it came to the table. We talked about Schull for ten minutes because I’d driven through it on the way down. He had an opinion about Schull, which he kept mostly to himself but which you could infer from his expression.
Skibbereen in February, the one time I went, had a fierce cold to it that came off the river and didn’t shift until midday. But the town itself was doing its ordinary business – the market, the shop, people going about – and there’s something good about being somewhere in the off-season when it’s carrying on regardless of you. The B&B was part of that. He wasn’t performing hospitality. He was just getting on with it.
3.
The third is the one I think about most. A small place in Baltimore, four or five rooms, above the harbour. I’ve stayed there twice. The first time was years ago, before the B&B, back when I was still teaching and had summers that belonged to me. The second time was more recent – the autumn before last, the same trip where I ended up going along the Ring of Beara on a wet Wednesday.
Baltimore in the off-season has an end-of-the-world quality to it that I mean as a compliment. The ferry to Sherkin Island runs, or doesn’t run, depending on the day. The sea is close in a way that’s different from home – louder, somehow, even when it’s calm. From the bedroom window you could see the lighthouse on the headland and, on clear mornings, the shape of Sherkin across the water. I lay in bed both times and looked at it before I got up, which is not something I usually do.
The woman who runs the place has been doing it for a long time. She didn’t ask where I was from or make conversation over breakfast beyond what was necessary, and I respected that more than I might have expected to. Some guests want the full social experience before nine in the morning. I’m not one of them. She seemed to understand this without being told.
All three of these are a long drive from here – from anywhere on the Dingle Peninsula, really. You go down through Killarney, out past Kenmare, across the Béara or around it depending on the day. There’s no fast route. West Cork in winter has a particular quality to it, a light and a quietness, that I find worth the distance, and small places like these are why the distance doesn’t put me off entirely.
I haven’t booked anything for this year. But I’ve been thinking about Baltimore since the weekend, and that harbour, and the lighthouse showing white in the morning.