Ireland Campervan Trip — Day 19: Slea Head Circuit and Conor Pass

And so we get to Michael…

And let’s be clear. This aire has got some mixed online reviews because of the way campers have been treated on arrival – I presume by Michael, but I guess it could have been somebody else.

Michael must see hundreds of couples and families in a season. You just can’t treat everyone as your best buddy. So I suppose he can come across as being a bit short.

Campers turn up at all times of the day and night (we experienced a couple of women turning up at about 8 in the evening, when we were having a Guinness in the pub, asking for space, and there was none… and a broken down motorhome arrived way past when we went to bed on the second night). And I’m sure some are miffed that their chosen destination is full.

In our experience most places we stayed at seemed to have enough capacity to accommodate late arrivals, so turning up somewhere and finding it’s full may seem unfriendly.

Even with other the aires, like Cobh, people just parked in the regular parking areas when the camping spots were full.

All that to say, it’s probably unusual to turn up somewhere and find there’s no space.

You can still park your van in the public car park across the road (free parking from 6 pm) and pay €10 to use M’s facilities. So it’s not like there are no options when he’s full.

And that’s what we recommended the two women do when they were asking for space while we were in the bar.

And Michael, does have a habit of wandering around the lot, not particularly engaging, and when he does he can be a bit snarky.

So the online reviews can be a bit mixed.

But if you show a willingness to listen then M is quite chatty. J chats anyway, and will tell you her life story at the drop of a hat.

Here are some of the things we heard. These are Michael stories, reported rather than fact-checked. We won’t cover what M told us he spent on the pub and aire but the numbers were large:

• Pub built in 1703. Used for all sorts including a workhouse and barracks. New commercial-grade laundry machines going in today. Lidl buying up liquor licences and opening off-licences when pubs shut.
• The Fish Box. Michael had plenty to say about how a restaurant that busy operated. None of it is ours to repeat as fact, so let’s leave that particular story in the pub.
• Fish for F&C shops is often flash-dried and then the bones squeezed for fish oil that’s used for pharmaceuticals etc.
• Record vans on this site is 32!
• M said that he’d trained Fungie (the harbour dolphin) when he was a teenager. So knew all about the dolphin.
• Michael worked in the US for about 8 years, at least initially as a plumber. He said he had a job just an hour and a half after stepping off the plane. He was known as Magic Mike.
• Irish dancing. M said he took up Irish dancing when he was 21 and was the best in Ireland 5 years later. Danced with Michael Flatley and for U2!

Dingle nightlife again. We understood from M and J that the noise we heard into the early hours was the overspill from the An Droichead Beag pub, which is very close to the Bridge House. It has a licence to 2:30 am. Lots of complaints from locals but M and J say that for some reason the council won’t do anything.

I could hear the noise coming from the An Droichead Beag, but TBH it didn’t keep me awake. If I’d have been sleeping in the old Vee-Dub van pop-top then the noise would have been much worse.

There were a lot more stories we got from M and J, but we’ll leave it there.

So we packed up and headed off. Our aim today is to drive the peninsula roads of Dingle, visit the Blasket Centre and maybe drive the Conor Pass if we think it’s safe for us to do so. We have a spot booked this evening in someone’s garden near Castlegregory.

Beehive Settlements

All along the coast road from Dingle to Dunquin there are signs inviting you to visit the remnants of “beehive” settlements. They also often offer the chance to “Pet a lamb”!

We stopped at one of the first ones and paid our €4pp to have a look around.

The huts are properly called clocháin: dry-stone buildings roofed by corbelling, with each layer of stone projecting slightly further inwards until the gap closes. Dating individual huts is difficult because the same building method was used for thousands of years. The wider Fahan group includes standing clocháin, souterrains, inscribed stones, crosses and ringforts.

We passed another 3 or 4 of these beehive museums as we drove the coast road. All seemed to be on private land and the landowner sat in a small hut selling you tickets to see their beehive houses.

Dunmore Head and more Whales

As we drove towards the Blasket Centre at Dunquin, the views out to the Blaskets and the coastline are as stunning as ever and we pulled in a couple of times to take a look.

But then we came to the parking for Dunmore Head and decided we’d take a better look. We just about squeezed into a parking space, overhanging the back as much as we could and so as not to take up too much space for vehicles to manoeuvre in front of us.

There was a beach below the car park that was attracting swimmers and kayakers.

And of course this is where some of the filming for The Last Jedi was done… Skellig Michael had supplied the original Ahch-To location, but later filming also used Dunmore Head and recreated the island’s beehive huts on Ceann Sibéal – much easier for getting all the kit and people there, and considerably kinder to the protected island.

But our real treat was to watch minke whales surfacing out to sea as we stood on the hilltop. We had been told that the minkes were quite nervous of the trip boats and they’d often disappear once a boat arrived on the scene. But either these whales were not so bothered, or there was enough food around that they overcame their fears.

Either way we were treated to about 20 minutes of watching at least two whales pop up every minute or so around the boats that were out there.

And then there were the views of the Blasket Islands.

After stopping to watch the whales, we wandered back to the van from the head, then we got on the road again.

The Blasket Centre

First off was some lunch and a coffee. They had very little in the way of GF options, but after a bit of a “you’re one of the few places we’ve found that don’t have GF options” the chef said he could do a beetroot salad with some chicken. I was very appreciative of that. I don’t think chefs appreciate that when they run a museum-restaurant, its a real bummer to turn up to their museum and find there’s nothing to eat. I think they should be made to go camping, plan on eating lunch at a place then be made to sit there while everyone else has lunch but they can’t.

We sat outside, with fantastic views of the coastline.

The Blasket Centre was built in 1993 and comprehensively redeveloped before reopening in 2022. It overlooks the Blasket Islands, which hold a particular place in Irish culture as one of the last bastions of the old way. The islanders spoke Irish but were taught to read and write only in English at school. Visiting scholars later encouraged some of them to learn written Irish and record their life stories in their native language. Peig Sayers, who never learnt to write Irish, dictated hers to her son Mícheál.

So the Centre celebrates all of that with quotes from the islanders, short biographies of some of the last inhabitants and audio-visual displays of all of that… including a 15-minute video in a big lecture theatre.

It must have been an idyllic place to live in the sunshine, but extremely harsh in the winters.

We then went outside to the island viewing platform.

The Ceann Sibéal Viewpoint at Clogher Head

Afte setting off again we stopped at this viewpoint. It’s still amazing that, given the view, there aren’t hordes of people spewing from coaches ogling the views. Maybe we just happened by at the right time, or the season has ended, or there just aren’t as many people as we might expect.

Overlooking Clogher Beach and Ferriter’s Cove. And out to the Three Sisters.

Ballyferriter

Just a random shot of these statues outside on the high street. Clearly the local filming for The Last Jedi made a bit of an impact on the tourist industry. But, TBH, they don’t make as big a deal of it as you might expect. We saw that in the Skellig Centre, they could have made a much bigger deal of it. There must be boats offering “Star Wars Skelligs landings” but we didn’t see too much of that.

Gallarus Oratory

Next up we went and found the Gallarus Oratory further round the coast, but inland.

This is probably an 11th- or 12th-century church, though it was once thought to date from the 8th century. So I’m definitely taking this as one to add to my derelict church count. I make this number 13.

The Conor Pass

Then we made our way back to Dingle to see if we could take the van over the Conor Pass. It’s a very winding and narrow road across the mountains from Dingle to Castlegregory.

There’s only a couple of really narrow sections, and the van would fit down them with no problem. The issue is that the sections are a few hundred metres long and if you meet another vehicle in those sections then one of you is going to have to back up. And if both of you have vehicles behind you, then there’s a lot of backing up, by somebody, to be done. And not everyone who travels these routes is up to getting themselves out of this sort of problem.

We got to the top of the pass from Dingle with no issues. The road up is winding but not narrow. The narrow bits are on the other side.

There were a few campervans and motorhomes already at the viewpoint at the top of the pass. And we’d seen a couple of smaller tour buses and vans already head down towards Castlegregory.

Cloghaneanode near Castlegregory

We then headed to our overnight stop in Barbara’s garden. She wasn’t in, but her German husband greeted us and helped us get settled into a patch of ground at the front of their house. We had electricity and access to drinking water along with grey disposal if we wanted it. €20 for the night.

Tomorrow we start heading home.