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Showing posts with the label Dingle Peninsula

A weekend in the Dingle, a damp drive and exciting lichen

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We woke to a drizzle the day after our 'Tom Crean experience'. We had not enlisted for the Tom Crean 19 mile endurance walk, and luckily that was sold out anyway, and given the weather would not have been pleasant by any yardstick. Instead we did what any old codger would do under the circumstances and go for a drive. The Slea Head Drive to be more precise and part of what the Dingle tourist board call the 'Wild Atlantic Way'. Wet and wild that particular Saturday. It is manners to drive clockwise around this circular route as the road is very narrow and cars coming the other way, as a couple did, cause all the traffic to snarl up. We started in Dingle where we stopped briefly by the harbour, before continuing until we shortly came to a museum. It was a private, commercial sort of venture, run by an American and called the Celtic and Prehistory Museum. And it was actually very interesting, containing some animal skeletons and stone axes and other such artefacts. Th

A weekend in the Dingle, arrival and the Tom Crean Festival

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It is a long way from Navan to the Dingle peninsula and we set out the next day after a very comfortable night at Vaughan and Truda's. Vaughan drove and we stopped for lunch in a bar, setting the trend of the holiday which contained a lot of eating and drinking! I didn't take any photographs until we got on to the peninsula which sticks out into the sea at the furthest south west of Ireland. We stopped by Inch Beach which has great views across to the Ring of Kerry. The weather was fine with scudding cumulus in the sky and, in true Irish fashion, this was to be the best day of the weekend. Inch beach is enormous and the tide was out leaving miles of reflective sand. I was tempted by a couple of panoramas. We finally arrived at the nub of the weekend, the Tom Crean festival. Tom Crean was a Polar explorer who had been part of Scott's fatal last journey to the South Pole on the Terra Nova expedition, and had also sailed with Shackleton on the En