The small fishing and market town of Dingle, County Kerry, Ireland ( "Daingean Ui Chuis" in Irish and "An Daingean" on direction signs) is the gateway to the West of Dingle, a landscape rich in many heritages: language, ancient & modern history, geology, peoples, wildlife, birdlife, fauna & flora. Although the Dingle Peninsula is a single place on the map, there are distinct differences in each place upon it. We can divide it around Dingle Town as East of Dingle and West of Dingle
This web site aims to help the visitor wondering 'Why go West of Dingle?' or thinking 'Surely a day trip will suffice it is so small an area'.
Dingle is a great base for doing West of Dingle, but there is plenty of accommodation further West. As well as many small named hamlets, larger townlands are also named on the maps. When the road signs were changed to kilometers the opportunity was taken to change the places signed to their Gaelic names. i.e "Ventry" is now signed as "Ceann Tra", this emphasises that the region is a Gaeltacht, a native Irish speaking area where Kerry Irish is spoken by many, although everyone is bi-lingual, so the visitor will have no problems speaking English or American.
The 12th of September 2009 saw the running of the first Dingle Marathon. As you can see from the map below, the course took runner on the most westerely, and to my mind, the most beautiful part of Europe. The half marathon course finished at Kruger's Pub, Dunquin and the full course continued around via Gallarus Oratory and over the steepest hill at 22 miles, before the downhill run in back into Dingle Town.
Other sports that fit well with the varied coastline of the peninsula are Wind-Surfing,
sail-boarding, kite-surfing, board-surfing, parascending from the rear of a speedboat, swimming (particularly at Ventry [Ceann Tra], Smerwick, Ballydavid [Baile Na Gall] and
Ballyferriter) a wet suit is advised for the less stalwart swimmer, sea fishing, walking
, climbing, horse riding, cycling (on and off road), kayaking, canoeing, to name but a
small selection. Send us a Tweet of those you have enjoyed around here.
There are lots of pics that I took up on Flickr and a random selection is shown below.
