We’d agreed the night before to leave by half eight. We left at twenty past nine, because Bríd needed more tea and I couldn’t find my left walking pole, which had been leaning against the wall all along and was simply not where I was looking.
Day three of the Dingle Way is Annascaul to Dingle – about twenty-four kilometres, depending on whose map you believe and how many wrong turns you make. It’s the longest day of the walk. I’d known this coming in and had decided, in the way you do from a warm kitchen in January while planning, that it would be fine. Standing on the street in Annascaul at half nine in late February with a damp wind coming down from the hills, the calculation looked slightly different.
The morning was grey and close. Not raining, but considering it. The fields above the village were still brown with winter and the lane we took out of Annascaul, off the main road, up between stone walls, was muddy enough that within ten minutes both of us had already abandoned any idea of keeping our boots clean.
The lane was the colour of something left out too long.
Bríd had been the one who suggested the Dingle Way, or that section of it anyway. We’d been talking about it since the back end of last year, vaguely, the way you talk about things that will probably not happen. Then in January I’d mentioned it again, and Bríd had said: right, February, let’s go – and before I had time to hedge we’d booked two nights in Annascaul and one in Dingle and that was settled. I’m glad she did it that way. I would have hedged indefinitely.
The first couple of kilometres took us up out of the village and across high ground looking back toward Anascaul Lake, which I’d last seen in November from the other direction, in different weather, on a shorter loop. That day the lake had been still and dark with the light already going. This time there was more sky. The water was pale grey, the same grey as the clouds, so that at certain angles it was hard to say where one stopped and the other started. Bríd stopped and looked at it for a moment and said ‘Lord’ and then we walked on.
The waymarking on this stretch is reasonable – yellow walking-man signs, the familiar silhouette – though at two points in the first hour we stood at junctions and interpreted the markers differently, Bríd arguing one way and me the other, and both of us eventually agreeing on a third option. We weren’t wrong, as it turned out, but we weren’t entirely right either, and we rejoined the proper route at a gate near the top of a field with a long view west, the Dingle Peninsula spreading out ahead of us toward the sea. On a clear day Brandon would have been behind us. That morning he was invisible, somewhere in the cloud.
Bríd got a blister by the time we reached the road section near Lispole. She didn’t say anything about it. I only knew because she sat down on a low wall without being asked, which is unlike her, and when I looked she was unlacing her boot with the resigned air of someone who has been expecting bad news.
‘How long?’ I asked.
‘Since the first gate, maybe.’
‘And you didn’t say.’
‘I was hoping it would sort itself out,’ she said, which is one of the more optimistic things I’ve heard about blisters.
We stopped there for twenty minutes. I had plasters and Compeed – I’d put them in at the last minute the night before, purely out of habit from the B&B days, because guests always arrived without them and always needed them. Bríd took two and applied them with the seriousness of someone defusing something, and then we walked on. She didn’t complain again.
The approach to Lispole from that direction is unremarkable, a long road section, though the fields on either side had the first tentative green of late February in them – not much, but something. The grass wasn’t the deep saturated green of spring, not yet. More a reminder than a promise. I’d noticed the same thing in the garden the week before, a slight brightening around the vegetable patch where the worst of winter seemed to be lifting.
The weather had been changing steadily since mid-morning. The grey had thickened by the time we crossed into the long valley section west of Lispole, and then around eleven the rain started – not heavy, but determined, the kind that settles in without announcement and gives no indication of stopping. We put on our waterproofs. I have an old green one that’s been losing its integrity for two seasons now, and within forty minutes I could feel damp at the shoulders.
The valley section is quiet. Even in summer I’d imagine it’s quiet. We saw two other walkers the whole day – a pair ahead of us who were moving faster and gradually disappeared over a ridge – and otherwise there were only sheep, which observed our arrival and departure with the flat patience they bring to everything. The lane through that stretch is narrow and hedged on both sides, and in winter the hedges are stripped back to their bones, all the hazel and hawthorn bare, so you can see through them into the fields beyond in a way that’s not possible in summer. There’s something slightly exposed about it. You feel seen, from a distance, by nothing in particular.
We ate lunch on a rocky outcrop above the valley – Bríd had brought proper sandwiches, brown bread and hard-boiled egg, which I ate with deep gratitude, having brought only cereal bars and one clementine – and from there we could see Dingle Bay appearing and disappearing behind cloud, a strip of dark water between two grey masses. The town itself wasn’t visible yet. It felt further away than it was.
By early afternoon we were on the descent toward Dingle, the ground dropping away steeply on a track that switches between rough path and boggy grass before finally becoming a proper lane above the town. My knees were registering their opinion of the slope. I hadn’t walked twenty-plus kilometres in one stretch since – I tried to think – possibly since the previous time I’d done this section, which was four or five years ago, before the B&B closed, when Donal had done day one and then pulled out with a heel problem and Bríd and I had finished the rest ourselves. He still mentions that heel, on Sundays. Gets the sympathy in early.
The descent takes longer than it looks on the map, which I’d been told and forgotten and was reminded of again as we came down through the wet grass with Dingle laid out below us and still seemingly no closer. But then a gate, and a lane, and suddenly the back streets of the town, and the harbour smell – salt, something rotting in a kind, natural way, diesel faint underneath – and we were in.
I’d been in Dingle in November, five nights off-season, and knew the harbour and the streets already. Coming in this way was different. On foot, from the hill, the town looked smaller and neater than it does from the road. The boats in the harbour were still. There were a few cars, a few people on the street, one or two looking at us in the way people look at walkers arriving – mild curiosity, slight sympathy.
We found the place we’d booked – small, up a side street, a woman in her seventies who showed us to our rooms without much ceremony and then asked if we wanted tea, which we both said yes to with more feeling than she probably expected. We sat in her kitchen with the tea and said very little for a while. Bríd took her boot off and inspected the blister, which had done better than expected.
‘I think the Compeed saved it,’ she said.
‘I’ll pass that on to the manufacturers,’ I said.
We went out that evening to a pub on the harbour – nothing elaborate – and ate food that tasted much better than it probably was, and talked about the day. About the valley section and the rain and the way the bay had appeared and disappeared. About the walk from Tralee to Annascaul the day before, which had been longer in its own way. About whether we’d do it again, the whole way.
Bríd said she would. She said Dingle to Dunquin next, maybe in summer, maybe with a third person if she could think of someone suitable. She mentioned two names, neither of whom I know well enough to walk twenty kilometres with in the rain, and I said so, and she said I’d warm to them, and I said perhaps.
I drove home the next morning. Twenty-five minutes up the road from Dingle to the cottage – I always forget how close it is when I’m walking it from the other direction. The garden looked the same as I’d left it. The apple tree bare. The stone wall with its low cap of moss. Bess came down the lane about an hour after I got back, sniffed at my boots with great interest, and then sat down heavily near the gate as if she too had covered some distance.
My boots are drying by the range. They’ll need another day.