Praise for Felicity Hayes-McCoy

‘I felt a sense of wellbeing. I had walked with her around the peninsula and experienced her wonder and delight. The book glowed with an appreciation of her lifestyle in Dingle.’

Alice Taylor

‘Powerful … reflecting on life with an inquiring intelligence and emotional honesty.’

The Sunday Times

‘There is something entirely Irish about her writing … the soft wild country of the Dingle Peninsula comes alive. Completely enchanting.’

Joanna Lumley

‘Thought-provoking … immensely entertaining.’

Irish Examiner

‘Outstanding.’

Sunday Independent

Herding sheep on a road above Ballyferriter.

Felicity Hayes-McCoy, originally from Dublin, also writes novels, and for radio, television, music theatre and digital media. Her father was the historian G. A. Hayes-McCoy. With her husband, the English opera director Wilf Judd, she divides her life and work between a flat in inner city London and a stone house at the western end of the Dingle Peninsula.

@felicityhayes-mccoy

@fhayesmccoy

felicityhayesmccoy.co.uk

To our friends and neighbours in Dingle and ‘back west’
Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine.

Mount Brandon from Béal Bán.

CONTENTS

Introduction

1 Dingle Town

2 Milltown and Burnham

3 Ventry

4 Around Slea Head

5 Dunquin

6 The Blasket Centre

7 From Clogher to The Three Sisters

8 Ballyferriter

9 Around Riasc

10 Ballydavid

11 Around Feohanagh

12 Brandon Creek

13 The way back to Dingle

Maps

Pronunciation Guide

Further Reading

Acknowledgements

Wild honeysuckle.

Introduction

The entrance to Dingle Harbour.

THIS BOOK AIMS to draw the reader into a deeper understanding and appreciation of the history and heritage of the western end of the Dingle Peninsula by offering not just facts and illustrations but personal views and experiences shared by people who live here. The core of each chapter is transcribed from a conversation between the authors and individuals who range from farmers and fishermen, musicians and teachers to a seafarer and boatbuilder, a chef, a broadcaster, a postmaster, a traditional sean-nós singer and a museum curator. We are deeply grateful to everyone who took time to sit at our kitchen table, or welcomed us into their own homes and workplaces, to make these recordings. We also owe a huge debt of gratitude to the many other individuals who offered stories, advice on the pronunciation guide, memories, facts and photographs, stopped us on high cliffs, sandy beaches and street corners, and sent texts and emails with additional remarks, information and insights.

In writing a guide to an area with a history that stretches back into prehistory, and an oral culture that offers myriad variations of stories, tunes, folklore and place names, we were inevitably faced with decisions as to what to include and what to leave out. Since our purpose is to encourage a deeper, more nuanced understanding of the area, we have made those decisions on the basis of offering readers a series of starting points for further conversations and for much enjoyable exploration of their own. Because, as everyone who has ever come to the western end of the Dingle Peninsula has discovered, one book or conversation or visit is never enough.

Choices also had to be made when deciding how best to convey the meaning and pronunciation of words and phrases in the Irish language. Generally, the English-language version of an Irish place name is either an anglicisation of its original Irish-language name or a direct or partial translation of it. (‘An Muiríoch’ becomes ‘Murreagh’, for example, and ‘Baile Dháith’, ‘Ballydavid’). As a rule of thumb, as our route takes us west along the Slea Head Drive, we have given the Irish-language name first when a place is first mentioned in the text, followed by its Anglicisation or translation in brackets. Overall, however, we opted for clarity over consistency and broke our rule where more explanation seemed necessary or interesting or where the English-language version is generally used locally. A guide to approximate pronunciations of Irish-language words is included at the back of the book.

The Irish and English forms of given names and surnames are often interchangeable, both in Dingle, where Irish is frequently spoken, and in the rural area beyond the town, known simply as ‘back west’, where it’s the first language of everyday life. This can occur regardless of which language is being spoken, so Máire Nic Gearailt can become Mary Fitzgerald – or Séamas Sullivan, Jim Ó Súilleabháin – within the same sentence. We have given the forms of individuals’ names as they were given to us, and clarified where it seemed necessary. It is worth noting here that, though standardised spelling exists in Irish, vernacular spelling is often still used, in particular where names are concerned.

But none of this matters when you let down your car window and ask for directions, or sit over a pint or a coffee chatting to local people. At the western end of the Dingle Peninsula the visitor’s experience is all the richer for the fact that the locality’s wealth of information, wit, wisdom and humour is expressed in not one but two languages.

THE STREETS OF DINGLE TOWN speak of how life is lived here; their narrow pavements require you to take your time and meet people’s eyes. You smile and step aside on the pavements and nod to the drivers on the road who pause and signal to let you cross. If you’re driving a car yourself you’ll notice that people approaching each other raise one finger from the steering wheel; it’s a salute that goes back to the time when every stranger and friend was greeted here with the same formal courtesy and every encounter was cause to stop for a chat.

A traditional readiness to engage with passers-by is part of the charm of the area. In the town, where the streets are often crowded in summer, you soon learn to take things a bit slower and to appreciate the rhythms of a different kind of life. The presence of the cattle mart on the Spa Road or the fact that the town has an active and vocal Fishermen’s Association can easily go unnoticed by a casual observer, yet they testify to an age-old involvement in farming and fishery that continues to the present day: and the combination of the locals’ culture of conversation with their knowledge of the land and the ocean is a gift to the curious visitor.

Dingle Pier has long served as a haven for Irish and foreign fishing boats in stormy weather.

The Dingle Peninsula stretches westwards about 50km into the Atlantic Ocean, with the Blasket Islands as an offshore extension of the mainland ridge. Its mountainous spine extends from Sliabh Mis (Slieve Mish) in the east to the transverse bulk of Cnoc Breannáin (Mount Brandon), the gateway to Dingle town, in the west. Beyond the town, and bisected by a high pass, are Sliabh an Iolair (Mount Eagle) and Cruach Mhárthain (Croagh Marhin), its most westerly mountains. The coastline is irregular and, along its length, the peninsula varies between 6 and 20km in width from north to south, with no point more than 8km from the ocean.

Dingle town, looking west.

The statue of Fungie, Dingle’s Dolphin.

Dingle town has a population of around 2,000, significantly increased in summer by the presence of visitors, and by part-time workers in the hospitality industry. At the head of the pier, close to the Tourist Information Office, is a bronze statue of Fungie the dolphin, arguably the town’s most famous character. His story exemplifies both the happenstance that characterises so much of Dingle life and the extent to which humans and the natural world exist here in harmony.

In the early 1980s fishermen at the harbour mouth began to notice a young bottle-nosed dolphin following their boats. Schools of dolphin and other marine life are frequently sighted in the area but this individual was no passer-by. Instead he showed an increasing interest in the boats and in sub-aqua divers. And eventually he became the focus of a major tourist attraction. As commercial fishing declined, trips to see Fungie began booming. And, in time, he began to give thrilling displays of leaping and dancing with a sense of awareness and comic timing that make it hard to believe that the choreography is his own: so much so, that local people are well used to visitors asking when the dolphin is fed or where the boatmen keep him. But Fungie is a wild dolphin. No one trained him. He hunts for his food and his interaction with humans is his own choice. That fact is a good starting point for remembering that the western end of the Dingle Peninsula is not a theme park but a living landscape. It’s a place with a rich and unique cultural inheritance that can best be explored not just through the usual interfaces provided for tourists but through relaxed conversation with the people who live and work here.

A 1950s postcard of Dingle’s Green Street, looking towards the nineteenth-century Roman Catholic church of St Mary. COURTESY CATHY CORDUFF

Although the Irish language is spoken far more widely west of Dingle, where it’s the first language of the people, you will see it written in signs in many of the shops and pubs in the town, and in some businesses you’ll see a sign near the till that reads ‘Tá cúpla focal agam’, which translates as ‘I have a few words’, indicating that whoever is serving speaks some Irish and will be delighted if customers use the language. In Irish ‘Go raibh maith agat’ means ‘thank you’ and ‘Slán’ means ‘goodbye’. ‘Dia dhuit’, which literally translates as ‘God be with you’, means ‘Hello’.

Seasonal festive celebrations are a tradition in Ireland, where rural communities are still linked to the rhythms of lives lived close to the earth and the ocean. In Dingle town they form part of a cultural fabric in which ancient ritual, conscious revival and comparatively recent innovation are interwoven.

‘Cúpla focal ’ sign in a local shop.

The Courthouse pub, next to Dingle’s Court House, on The Mall.

The modern Food Festival takes place at a time of the year when harvest festivals were traditionally held across Europe, celebrating the gathering-in of produce to last rural communities through the winter. The music events that accompany it are part of a strong local tradition in which the oral inheritance of the area is passed on in music, song and storytelling; and any night of the week throughout the year you can find both organised and impromptu music sessions in many of the town’s pubs. Music is also central to Dingle’s St Patrick’s Day celebrations, on 17 March, when fife-and-drum bands and traditional instrumentalists parade through the streets in honour of Ireland’s patron saint. The town’s May Festival, Féile na Bealtaine, celebrates the coming of summer with storytelling, song, dance, visual arts, literature and music, both traditional Irish and cosmopolitan.

In 2002 the first Other Voices event was recorded in St James’ Church in Dingle’s Main Street, spawning an international music series that marked its tenth anniversary with two shows at New York’s Le Poisson Rouge. It returns to its Dingle roots each December, to record a television spectacular which mixes contemporary and traditional music and, over the years, has featured performances from artists as diverse as Amy Winehouse, Sinéad O’Connor, Snow Patrol, Rufus and Martha Wainwright and Jarvis Cocker.

Many of Dingle’s longer-established events are echoes of seasonal gatherings that were part of the pre-Christian Celtic calendar. The town’s annual horse races and the rowing regatta in the harbour take place in August, when festivals were traditionally held to honour the god Lugh; the three-day races are Ireland’s largest horse and pony race meeting, and both it and the regatta are organised and run by local volunteers.

The Wren’s Day in Dingle town combines modern charity collections with ancient ritual.

Dingle’s largest and most famous seasonal festival has origins rooted in pre-Christian midwinter ritual across Europe and Scandinavia. Lá an Dreóilín was once a major feast throughout the country. Celebrated on 26 December, its name translates as The Wren’s Day, linking it to the Christian legend of the wren that betrayed the martyr St Stephen, whose feast falls on the same date. Throughout the day, groups of musicians and revellers parade the streets. Although identified with different parts of the town by the colours they wear, their costumes are disguises. They range from beautifully made straw masks and skirts to blackened faces and tattered clothing and, in many cases, men dress as women and vice versa, underlining the idea of a festival of Misrule. The groups are known collectively as ‘Wrans’ (from the local pronunciation of ‘wren’) and some carry a crudely made effigy of a horse; when they meet they stage mock stand-offs, encouraged by the onlookers. The festival was variously condemned and partially stamped out both by the Church and state authorities over the centuries. In its present form it has probably been influenced by medieval mummers’ plays subsequently introduced to Ireland by English soldiers and settlers, whose own Christmas folk traditions were equally resonant of pre-Christian ritual. The Wren’s Day in Dingle is very much a festival for the townspeople and money collected by the marchers is given to charity: photos and artefacts relating to it can be seen in many of the town’s pubs and premises. Other, far smaller, Wrans walk and drive the roads and play music in pubs and houses farther west; often they’re made up of groups of children who use the money they collect for the more traditional purpose of buying sweets and provisions for a party.

Entrance to Dingle Library and Thomas Ashe exhibit.

Dingle Library, on Green Street, had a complex genesis. In 1909 the MP for West Kerry successfully applied to The Carnegie Trust for a grant to establish a public library but it was not built until 1918 as no suitable site could be found in the town. Its opening was then delayed until a dispute over the lease of the site with the landlord, Lord Ventry, was resolved in 1928. It was not until 1934 that the building opened, incorporating into its collection about 100 volumes that had formed a lending library at The Dingle Temperance Hall. For a number of years the Carnegie building was also used as a community and social centre, and for dances and theatrical performances. It was renovated in the mid-1980s and now provides an adult and children’s lending library, reference and study areas, exhibition facilities, public internet access, a range of audio-visual and computer equipment, and a fine collection of material, in both Irish and English, specifically related to the Dingle Peninsula. A small exhibition centred on Thomas Ashe, a local man who was one of the heroes of Ireland’s 1916 Rising, was remounted to celebrate the centenary year.

Monsignor Pádraig Ó Fiannachta, an academic, poet and priest who was born in the locality and died here in 2016, was a professor of Early Irish and a Welsh Language lecturer in St Patrick’s College Maynooth from the 1960s: he became Professor of Modern Irish there in 1982 and was the translator and editor of the only modern Bible in the Irish language, completed in the twentieth century, An Bíobla Naofa (An Sagart, 1981). In 1993 he presented Dingle Library with a large personal book collection of over 4,600 items. An extension was added to the rear of the building to house it. Thereafter, the Monsignor continued to add to the collection, which now has over 6,000 items. It includes facsimile editions of rare Irish manuscripts and annals, sets of learned journals, Irish dictionaries from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and Greek readers that once belonged to Éamon de Valera. A wide and varied selection of subjects is covered including Irish literature, the Irish language, local history, archaeology, religion, hagiography, folklore, art, poetry and history. The books are in English, Irish, Latin, Welsh, Breton, Russian, German, French, Greek, Spanish, Korean and Japanese.

Books are sold in various gift shops and supermarkets in the town and Dingle has two thriving independent bookshops. One, in Green Street, keeps an extensive range of stock, for the general reader. The other, in Dykegate Lane, off Main Street, carries an equally broad range of books, and specialises in Irish-interest and Irish-language material. The McKenna family opened a café in Dykegate Lane in 1939 and for many years it was a popular eating place for farmers coming to town to sell cattle. In 1979 it became An Café Liteartha, ‘The Literary Café’, where politics and local affairs were discussed at the rear and books sold at the front. Its layout and appearance have hardly changed since then, and Seoirse Ó Luasa who owns and runs it is a fount of knowledge on Irish books and publishing.

Looking north from Dykegate Lane towards Main Street.

Dykegate Lane, looking south towards the Phoenix Cinema.

Farther along Dykegate Lane is the 150-seat, family-run Phoenix Cinema which is one of the oldest independent cinemas in Ireland. Built with a sprung floor, the cinema doubled as the town’s dance hall until the 1970s. Now it shows recently released films throughout the year, with Art Film Nights on Tuesdays, when tea and biscuits are served to the audience. The Dingle International Film Festival, which was founded in 2007, takes place annually in March: it promotes and platforms Irish film, filmmakers and animation, and plays host to major industry players from Ireland and abroad. The festival’s Gregory Peck Award for Excellence in the Art of Film is named for the Hollywood actor who, through his Irish-born paternal grandmother Catherine, was related to Thomas Ashe.

There is no native Irish tradition of theatre; it arrived from England, initially took hold in the cities in the eighteenth century, and has flourished in Ireland ever since. Dingle town has two theatres, one, at Cooleen, near the seafront, and the other further up the town, at the top of John Street. At Cooleen, the Beehive Theatre gives well-attended amateur performances in English. An Lab, in John Street, is housed in a space that was once the science lab of the former Christian Brothers’ secondary school, a nineteenth-century building which closed as a school in 2007. It stages amateur and professional productions, mainly in the Irish language, presents art exhibitions, and holds concerts at lunchtimes and in the evenings; the mixed media flavour of its output reflects a fusion of local and imported performance tradition.

The extraordinary beauty of the area and the quality of the light reflected from the ocean have brought many professional and amateur artists to Dingle, and the town has several small galleries as well as shops selling works by local craftspeople and artists. Since 1998 The Díseart Institute of Education and Celtic Culture has occupied the nineteenth-century neo-Gothic building beside the Catholic church on Green Street, formerly home to an enclosed community of Presentation nuns. The convent chapel is lit by twelve windows commissioned by the sisters and designed and installed in the 1920s by the Dublin-born stained-glass artist and book illustrator Harry Clarke, a leading figure in the Irish Arts and Crafts Movement. Both the convent and church were designed by the Irish architect J. J. McCarthy; construction began on the church in 1868 and – as happened less radically to other churches across the country – its interior and exterior appearance was substantially altered in the 1960s in response to guidelines for reordering issued by the Second Vatican Council.

Many buildings in the town have stories attached to them. At the junction of Goat Street and Green Street, for example, is The Rice House, which in the eighteenth century belonged to James Louis Rice, a prosperous local wine merchant. Rice, who was educated in Belgium, joined the Austrian army and became an intimate friend of the Hapsburg emperor Joseph II, who made him a Count of the Holy Roman Empire. According to local tradition, during the French Revolution, when the emperor’s sister Marie Antoinette was imprisoned with her family in Paris, Rice contrived to bribe her gaolers and arranged relays of horses to take her to the French coast, where one of his family’s merchant ships was waiting to smuggle her to Dingle. Legend has it that rooms had been prepared for the queen at The Rice House but that, at the last moment, she refused to abandon her family, remaining with them in their prison in the Temple in Paris and dying with her husband on the guillotine.

The story of Dingle town itself is one of enterprise, struggle and adjustment; periods of peace and prosperity have alternated with times of unrest and extreme poverty, and the townspeople have a resilience born of that knowledge. They also have a deep respect for their own history, exemplified by the carefully maintained site of a mass graveyard on the hillside above the building that was once the town’s workhouse. The site, which is reached via Chapel Lane, off Goat Street, and has car parking a short walk from the graveyard, is a place that Cormac O’Sullivan suggests to visitors seeking an insight into Dingle and its people. During the Great Famine of the 1840s the bodies of an estimated 8,000 men, women and children were buried here, in what is now a small green field bounded by low stone walls and flanked by a covered area with a view of the ocean and benches for prayer and contemplation. As well as the Famine victims, it was a burial ground for unknown drowned sailors and, in living memory, for stillborn babies. In 2016, interviewed by a local journalist, the volunteers who care for the site explained that they do so ‘to honour the people buried here’. One man who knows that members of his own family rest there in unmarked graves says that whenever he comes to cut grass and clear weeds at the graveyard he stays to speak to them. ‘I talk to them. I do. Because their spirit is here.’

Dingle’s Famine graveyard.