Castletownbere and Bere Island 5km

Castletownbere is a busy fishing port that sits on a sheltered bay which is covered on the ocean side by Bere Island. The town was once a stronghold of the O’Sullivan Bere clan. Their nearby Dunboy Castle was besieged and destroyed by sea borne English forces in 1602.

During WW1 the harbour was used as a base for American seaplanes. The harbour itself is one of what are known as the 3 “Treaty Ports”. One of the conditions of the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1921, was that after Irish Independence the harbour along with Cobh outside Cork City and Lough Swilly in County Donegal, were to remain under British control. The British wanted them to be able to be used as naval bases. In 1938 the ports were handed  back to the Irish government. Bere Island has many forts and gun emplacements built to protect the harbour.

The Beara Peninsular is by far the least touristy of the three we are visiting. Kerry has the most tourists, closely followed by Dingle. But Beara is nice and quiet and we haven’t seen a tour coach yet. They say it is like Ireland used to be 20 or 30 years ago totally tranquil and unspoiled. Compared to Kerry and Dingle it seems completely forgotten about.

Today was a soft day in two senses. A soft day of walking. We walked back into town and caught the little ‘landing craft’ car ferry over to Bere Island which only takes about 15 minutes for the crossing. The island is approx 10 km x 3km and has a walking loop of 28km. There is a little village (Rerrin) about 5km from the ferry and several other points of interest; a light house, wedge tombs, standing stones, military fortifications, castle ruins, signalling towers etc. All these involved long walks which we chose not to do.

The other sense of it being a ‘soft’ day is the Irish description of the weather. It was a day of low mist, no wind, quite warm, Not really raining but enough to get you quite damp. Quite a lot of glare with the sun trying to get through the grey skies. What here is called a ‘soft’ day. So it was the kind of day that didn’t engender a lot of enthusiasm.

Irish saying for the day: Sometimes I laugh so hard the tears run down my leg.