Random scenery as we started off in the ring:
One of the first places that we stopped was Ballycarberry Castle, which is a ruined castle not far from the ocean. There were barbed wire fences around the castle, but since people had obviously been climbing under the fence, so did we.
I really enjoyed this castle because, as I've said before, I like ruins more than I like functioning castles, and because we were the only people there for most of the time that we were there. It's nice when you can enjoy such things without distraction. It really gets the imagination going.
We drove around for a while in the area and finally found the Ring Forts. There are apparently several of them, but we found just two. They're forts built out of local stone, and are as much as 1000 years old. It was raining pretty hard when we got to the first one, which was a bummer, but the weather was a little bit better when we got to the second one, which was nice as it was more intact than the other and offered better views of the surrounding area.
One of the things I had wanted to do while we were doing the Ring of Kerry was take a ferry out to Skelling Michael, a tiny island where there is an old monastery. It quickly became clear that there wasn't going to be time to do this. However, we found a decent hike on Valentia Island (a small island connected to the Irish mainland by a bridge, just off the Ring of Kerry) that would give us views of the distant skelligs (tiny islands). We spent more than 1.5 hours hiking up and down a hill, but I really enjoyed the hike and the views of the surrounding area that we got.
The skelligs:
When we finished the hike, we drove back to the Ring and continued south. It was around this time that the weather turned really foul, with it being worst when we got to Derrynane House, which was the home of some Irish freedom fighter. Becca had really wanted to see this house, but I refused to pay the admission fee after finding that the house was neither very old nor very impressive. So, we continued walking the grounds and went over to the beach to see if we could find the nearby abbey.
The abbey is typically separated from the rest of the area by water. However, when the tide is out you can walk to it, and since the tide was out, we went over. It was raining quite a bit--note the low clouds in some of my photos--but we were able to do our thing without getting horribly wet, and we got a few decent pics, too.
The water was very clear, and if the weather is ever warm and sunny (which I doubt), this would be a pretty great place to hang out at the beach.
Becca next to some giant rhubarb on the Derrynane House grounds:
After we were done at Derrynane, we continued driving the Ring and ended up at a few scenic overlooks, the most important of which was the Ladies View, which is a place that Queen Victoria and her ladies-in-waiting visited and enjoyed in the 1800s. The view was pretty great (it's Killarney National Park below), but it was marred by bad weather.
Since the weather was bad, we decided to bag it after a few minutes and come back the next day (if the weather looked like it was going to be any better). So, we drove back to Killarney and decided to find dinner. We settled on a fast food joint, and enjoyed burgers, fries with curry sauce (kind of odd but pretty tasty) and a bit of fried chicken. I was in the mood for some ice cream, so we found a small shop and had some ice cream as well. The "expensive" trend continued, and the tiny ice cream scoops we got summed up perfectly the overpriced nature of eating out in Ireland. Still, the ice cream was good and I particularly enjoyed the honeycomb-flavored ice cream that made up one of my two scoops.
I know, I know--there was so much ice cream there, I didn't know what to do with myself.
All in all, a really good day, and my favorite day of the four we were in the country.
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