Our Dream House in Ireland

Our dream cottage on the Beara Peninsula, Ireland.

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On many mornings at our rented cottage on the Beara, Ellen and I woke early and walked for a few hours while the girls slept, rousing them later to start their day.  One morning, we drove west a couple of miles along the narrow road to Allihies and then walked to an abandoned fishing village that we'd heard about.

The walk passed a small cluster of stone houses at the paved road, and then followed a two-track through fern and foxglove fields and around a steep hill that dropped to the ocean.  The sun was warm and the light was beautiful.  Sheep complained as we passed, but we didn't take them seriously and they went back to their meals as soon as we were gone.

After about a mile, we came upon a perfect white stone cottage, built right at the high tide line in a protected rocky cove beside the sea.  Deep in the ferns beside the ruin of an older stone house, the cottage was almost hidden from view until you were right above it.  Steps led to a stony beach where an old wooden boat rested.  Peering through the windows revealed a lovely fireplace, baskets of seashells on a windowsill, cozy furniture, a substantial rustic dining room table, bottles of wine in a rack, and a Whole Foods bag hanging from a hook in the mudroom.

Later we learned that the house had once been the home of a fishing family, and that they tied their boat right to the front porch to unload their catch.  More recently, it had been purchased by a French couple, who came to stay from time to time, dashing our (idle) fantasies of buying this perfect place.

Farther along the road, the village itself was spread sparsely across a lush green hillside--stone houses and ruins of older houses with views to the ocean.  Some of the houses were being renovated (by an artist, we learned later), and were lovely inside.  Others were as they had been left, some open to the weather.   A small greenhouse was in disarray, but still full of flowers.  We walked across the hill looking at each structure, and then followed old stone walls down to the rocky shore and back to the white cottage for one last look before reluctantly walking back to our car.

Sometimes when traveling you happen upon places where you could have lived in another life. This place was one of them, and it wasn't hard to imagine days spent reading on the couch in the living room, swimming in the cove, or wandering along the shore. But the French couple beat us to it, and we had a different life to resume, and three teenagers to roust from their beds.

Along the road that leads to the cottage.

First view of the old village which is now being renovated into an artist's colony.

Wooden boat in the cottage cove.

The cove.

Ellen in the old fishing village.

View east along the coast from the fishing village.

One of the renovated houses in the old fishing village.

The old fishing village.

One of the renovated houses in the village.

The walk from the village back to the cottage

Ellen on the walk from the village to the cottage.

The sea along the coast near the cottage.

Seaweed in the cottage cove.

A last look before leaving it behind.

Layers of History in Ireland

Wooden boats, Eyeries, Beara Peninsula, Ireland.

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We've returned, reluctantly, from our five-weeks of travel in Europe, and despite my best intentions, I managed to post to this blog exactly once while we were on the move.  Between a surprising lack of usable internet connectivity in many of the places we stayed, to not having time to process the raw images that I shoot, to just wanting to sit and relax with a beer after long days exploring with Ellen and the three girls (Bei and her cousins, Lauren and Leigh), it didn't happen.  Now that I'm back in Laramie, I'm faced with just a couple of weeks to get ready for the school year, but I'm eager to post some photos, so I'll start now.  

Our trip began in Ireland and most of our time there was spent on the Beara Peninsula which juts into the Atlantic near the southwestern corner of the island, along with the Kerry Peninsula just to the north and the Dingle just north of that.  Those two are more famous tourist destinations, and I chose the Beara to escape the tour buses, which apparently are thick as tourists are driven around the loop roads that hug the coast. The Beara has somehow avoided the worst of this, despite its gorgeous mountains and coastline and picturesque villages of brightly painted houses.  Perhaps it is the extremely narrow roads squeezed between stone walls that make navigating by bus more challenging on the Beara.  

Interestingly, the Beara was famous for copper mining in the late 1800s (and all the way back to the Bronze Age for that matter), with deep mines following quartz veins sandwiched between steeply dipping sandstones and "mudrock."  Mining centered around the town of Allihies, very near the cottage we rented during our week on the peninsula.  Miners frequently died in the desperately dangerous mines, and lived in near poverty. When copper mining became uneconomic, many of them migrated to Butte, Montana, and there's a strong connection today between the Beara and Butte, where apparently there are many O'Sullivans and Harringtons in the phone book, prominent names on the Beara (most of the grocery stores we patronized were called O'Sullivan's).  

In Ireland, where it is wet, cool, and famously green, layers of peat build up quickly even on steep terrain, and millennia of human history are layered on top of one another and embedded in the peat.  In more recent history, stone houses were the norm (and still are today), and there are hundreds of abandoned homes that become exquisite places for flowers and ferns to grow among the stones.  Farther back, castles and ring forts stood in defensive positions and many remain.  In deeper history, megalithic cultures left tombs, standing rocks, and stone circles that resemble Stonehenge, though less grand.  Ellen and I found dozens of megalithic tombs once we learned how to see them.  More recent graveyards have layers of graves, with new tombstones on top of old, unmarked ones, all in a sea of green.  

Layers of fences--stone walls are everywhere, but they are rarely tall enough to contain livestock.

An old copper mine engine house at Allihies.

Abandoned stone house, Garinish.

Gravestone, Allihies.

Memorial highlighting ties to Butte, Montana.

Boat detail near Eyeries.

One of the oldest crosses on the peninsula, at Kilcatherine Church.

Megalithic tomb near the summit of Knocknagallaum (a mountain near our cottage).

Stone circle near Castletownbere.

Steps, abandoned fishing village.

Abandoned stone house.

The Ogham Stone, near Eyeries.

Stonework, Kilcatherine Church.

Kilcatherine Church.