Today is a non-driving day. We booked a couple of nights at the award-winning Mannix Point campsite just outside of Cahersiveen so we could do some washing and explore (not necessarily at the same time!). We thought we might get a boat trip out to the Skelligs, but in the end they were all sold out for today. So we’ve booked a trip for tomorrow.
And that means we can explore Valentia Island today. We’ll take the bikes and get the ferry to Knightstown, then cycle to the Skellig Experience Centre and then decide what we’ll do from there.
But the first job was to finish off the washing that had been hanging up in the van over night – making for a very damp night! Sue went and got another dryer token and that was enough to dry all our wet things from the abortive wash attempt yesterday.
Then it was off to the ferry.
We cycled along the quiet coast road to Chapeltown and then took the main road to the Skellig Experience Visitor Centre, which is next to the road bridge that connects the mainland to Valentia.
They don’t show a lot of the Star Wars filming at the centre but there’s a Chewbacca cut-out and a modest video display of the filming. You can also buy some oddly sloganned Skellig Star Wars t-shirts.
The rest of the displays are about the Skellig monks and their time on Skellig Michael. The monastery was founded sometime between the sixth and eighth centuries, and the monks left in the thirteenth century.
There’s a little bit about the wildlife and the history of the lighthouse, which became automated in 1987.
Then we had some lunch, a stew with a view! Great stew! And apparently the scones were good too, certainly generously sized.
We rode the bikes over to Portmagee to see if we could find out more about our boat trip tomorrow. We’d heard reports that trips were being cancelled due to the high winds. The rep from the boat company we talked to didn’t sound optimistic.
So we rode back over to Valentia and decided what we really needed was a 10 km bike ride, up and down some very steep hills, to see some 385 million year old tetrapod footprints.
On the way we stopped at Bray Head to get some misty pictures of the Skelligs. Weather not great today now.
Then from Bray Head we cycled “round the back of the island” to take a look at the dino-footprints.
We’re not entirely sure what all the hard hats were about on the “back road”. Scratch that… we have absolutely no idea what all the hard hats were about.
Somewhere down here are the dino-prints.
And this is it. The hills we freewheeled down were serious. 1-in-4s. Not sure we’d have done the trip if we hadn’t had lecky bikes, ‘cos the ride back up would have been brutal.
There’s a couple of tracks made by an unnamed tetrapod from about 385 million years ago. There’s also a tail swoosh as well, but we’re not dino-nerds so really couldn’t tell swoosh of dino from swoosh of geology.
And then it started to rain as we scaled up gravel path back to the main road. This was more like a 1-in-3, but easy peasy in turbo mode!
After scaling the hills back to the top of the island, it was freewheeling again down the other side to the ferry at Knightstown.
Not unsurprisingly, and extremely stereotypically, a bunch of French cycle-hire day trippers pushed in on the ferry queue as we waited for the ferry to arrive. Way more amusing than annoying – though not sure we’d have found the funny side if there wasn’t enough room on the ferry for us.
After the ferry and the ride back up into Cahersiveen we hit Super-val-you hard. Well… some tortilla chips and some tuna for wraps!
As we were lounging in our lounge this evening we got an email cancelling our boat trip to the Skelligs tomorrow – bugger! The force is clearly very weak with us. New plan required.
It rained really hard as we were lounging… and the bedtime wee and toothebrush session was an exercise in “dodge the puddles in the dark”.
J
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