Ireland - Hiking the Dingle Way

I arrived in Ireland and headed straight to Kilkenny to catch up with Kate, an intrepid hiker that I met last year in Nepal. We made it into town just in time to see Lisa Hannigan play a brilliant live set to a sold out crowd.  The venue was outstanding!

Despite the having just run three marathons in as many days earlier that week, Kate managed to talk me into joining her on "The Dingle Way" a 170km hike in South-Western Ireland.

The Dingle Way is more like an endurance pub-crawl than a traditional hike. Each day we walked for several hours along country roads, through fields and along long stretches of beach before stopping each evening at a different small town and heading out to explore the local pubs.

One tiny town had an impressive ratio of 7 pubs to 2 non-pub shops. Another 'pub' in Dingle was divided right down the middle - half pub, half fully functional hardware store. They seemed to be selling a lot more beer than hardware!

There was live music on offer in most towns with the band played traditional Irish songs and covers of modern pop/rock which usually sounded better than the originals. Although we didn't meet many other hikers, there were friendly locals everywhere. Their thick Kerry accents often made them completely incomprehensible but you didn't need to understand them to know that they were probably complaining about the weather. If this pony could talk, he would've complained about the weather too.

By Irish standards the weather was actually pretty good. The sun made a few brief appearances (I even got slightly sun-burnt) and although it often threatened to rain, we only got completely drenched once. We had walked about 25km before it started raining and we ended up having to walk another 15km while it bucketed down. In the process we passed through several deserted holiday-home ghost-towns, a legacy of the Celtic Tiger boom of the mid-2000s. We'd been walking for almost 12 hours when we finally stumbled, saturated and shivering into a guest-house but after a hot whiskey and several pints of Guinness, all was forgotten.

Although the terrain was generally quite flat, the scenery was amazingly green and impressively rugged with lots of free-stone walls and curious animals. A highlight for me was a 12km stretch along Ireland's longest beach with huge storm clouds building up behind us.

If you're ever in Ireland with a few days to spare, a willingness to walk long-distances and a taste for Guinness then I can highly recommend The Dingle Way. Thanks a million to Kate for a fantastic hike!