Beara Way : Allihies - Dursey Sound
Day 5 : Saturday, 11th August.
The walk from Allihies to Dursey Sound is a distance of about 14kms and a maximum ascent of 200 meters. Today’s track will take us to the very tip of the Beara peninsula, the impressive Dursey Sound, where we will stay two nights at Windy Point House to enjoy the hospitality of Paddy and Agnes Sheehan. Paddy is also the cable car operator and will take us over Dursey Sound to Dursey Island tomorrow.
We leave Allihies heading south towards Ballydonegan Beach (the beach I did mention before), one of the few beaches on the Beara peninsula. Here we decide to have some coffee and eat a sandwich. The weather is windy and some drizzle is falling down from heaven. Nevertheless it doesn’t stop us from sitting down and admiring the scenery of Ballydonegan Bay which we still can enjoy for quite some time when we continue our walk to Dursey Sound, contouring around the hillside of Lackacroghan, overlooking the deep blue sea and across to Cod’s Head.
Sometimes it is a bit difficult to see the markers, but we use an OS-map next to the route description we received from SouthWest Walks and manage to keep following the right track. However it went wrong when we were caught in a dense fog along Mount Lackacroghan and were running around like blind men. Garinish Bay is below us with its quay sheltering behind Garinish and Long Islands and its beaches, White Strand and Garinish Strand, like a booklet tells us but unfortunately we aren’t able to see anything of it due to the dense fog. At last, after quite some time, our navigator Evert succeeds in putting us on the right track again.
We’re headed for Firkeel Gap towards Firkeel. Next the road climbs zigzagging and becomes unsurfaced in order to direct us into a high walled narrow path with a stream running down some of it since it has been raining a bit today. It is quite a tough climb with water below of us and Fuchsia’s slapping our faces all the time. This narrow path with Fuchsia’s overgrowth, which really is a feast for our eyes, leads us to open hillside with low gorse bushes. On this very hill some impressive reminders of World War II can be seen: several lookout posts. From the first of these we get sight of Dursey Island with its signal tower. The weather is foggy and rain starts to fall as we continue our Irish trial over Crow Head towards Dursey.
It is quite a rocky track with some real precipitous descends and quite some stiles and fences to cross in order to get to the main road which will lead us to our accommodation at Dursey Sound. We are really looking forward to our accommodation for it was a weary walk today, the weather was foggy and wet and we managed to lose our track again somewhere on the hill were we were caught in a dense fog. And now a hot meal and a warm bath were luring us...
There are a lot of old mineshafts around here; most of them have fencing around to prevent people and animals from falling into them. Really dangerous! Passing by the ruins of an old church we walk into the village to look for Sea View House, our place to spend the night, hosted by Mrs. Mary O’Sullivan. It is Friday, so let’s enjoy real Irish live music in the pub next to our guesthouse. After all this strain a Guinness is and always will be the ultimate delight! It is the one and only reason we work ourselves to the bone, her in the remoteness of this lovely emerald isle.
Original Source : Shamrock Memories
