Irelands

The Sheep’s Head peninsula is clearly a good place to be a skylark. They seem to warble overhead at every turn, singing their little hearts out – and who could blame them? The hills here are high and heathery, the sea breeze is warmed by the Gulf Stream and the edge-of-the-world scenery is a realm of wild green slopes and endless blue Atlantic. If you had to choose a sky to lark in, the one that crowns this County Cork headland is a bona fide wing-quiverer.

The peninsula wows hikers, too. I’ve come to one of the south-westernmost points on the Irish mainland to trek the Sheep’s Head Way, a long-distance trail opened by the local community 30 years ago this summer. It took serious work to complete – more of which later – but it’s a delight. I’m walking the original 55-mile (88km) loop around the peninsula, although a longer, 63-mile option is now considered the official route. The way attracts a fraction of the numbers drawn to the Kerry Way and Dingle Peninsula trail further north, and thanks to its untrammelled paths and rampant, cliff-edged scenery, the rewards are grand, in every sense.

“Ah, you’ll love it,” enthuses Thérése Linehan of Doire Liath B&B in Bantry, having fuelled me with poached eggs and soda bread for breakfast. “People do.” This colour-splashed harbour town, at the landward end of the peninsula, is the route’s start and end point. I’m setting off on a Friday and the waterside square is busy with market stalls: fresh seafood, local artworks, turbo-strength flat whites. A statue of 18th-century revolutionary Wolfe Tone stares out to sea. I dawdle a while in the chilly May sunshine, then walk west.

The early miles wind up into the range of rounded drumlins that form the spine of the peninsula. Wildflowers speckle the gorse verges; boggy paths squelch underfoot. Soon, the views open up. Bantry Bay to the north, Dunmanus Bay to the south and a belt of shaggy-grassed peaks stretching out ahead. Swallows are cavorting in the wind. I turn and see nothing but hills, ridges and sea. Where is everyone?

Despite being almost at the westernmost limits of the European map, the region is no historical hinterland. Folklore holds that Bantry Bay was the place where feet were first planted on Irish soil, in 2680BC. Millennia later, in 1796, the same bay witnessed an attempted landing by a vast French fleet looking to help local resistance forces against English rule, only to be thwarted by storms. I’m luckier with the weather. Today the bay is sun-stippled and marble smooth.

The themes of this first day – near-empty trails, unbridled scenery, spring birdlife and heady history – set the tone for those that follow. The loop walk is traditionally split into five or six days – I’m doing it in five. For the first two, with crags and coastal meadows cascading around me, I pass only sheep. Cuckoos sound from woodland patches, stonechats flit between rocks, squadrons of hooded crows glide overhead. High, lonely stiles come in their dozens; abandoned 1840s stone homesteads stand sentry above the sea.

At one point the trail ascends to a 345m (1,130ft) viewpoint known as Finn McCool’s Seat, where the legendary giant is said to have sat and rested. I do the same, gazing at the peninsulas further north. I don’t know whether, like me, McCool was sapped enough to wolf down two packets of Taytos while he lingered.

There are few settlements on the first half of the anticlockwise route, so prearranged road transfers take me to and from Bantry to the trail on the first two days. The town has the advantage of myriad pubs and restaurants. Ma Murphys bar, 185 years old, does a fine drop of Murphy’s – which often outsells Guinness in these parts – and sets things up nicely for what is arguably the scenic climax (and far and away the busiest part) of the walk, a roller-coaster trek on Day 3 out to the lighthouse on the promontory’s furthest cliffs.

I reach it in early afternoon. The sea is huge and aglitter. Gannets patrol the waves. To the south, across Dunmanus Bay, is Mizen Head, traditionally the last finger of Irish land seen by people sailing to North America. The Sheep’s Head path now spins on its heel and heads east, past a wayside shrine and a tea-and-toasties cafe. Within half an hour the trail is deserted again, its yellow markers leading back into the tussocky green of the hills.

The trail is so well signed that it’s easy to overlook the complexity of shaping a hike around an entire peninsula. The Sheep’s Head Way has an office in the village of Kilcrohane, my base for that night, where I meet local farmer James O’Mahony. Now 82, he was one of the original mid-1990s founders of the trail, along with the late Tom Whitty, a Philadelphian who fell in love with the region. They envisaged a hike that would promote the peninsula’s charms to the full, benefiting not just walkers but local communities. Setting it up, however, required effort.

“There’s no crown land in Ireland, it’s all freehold,” explains James, speaking softly in a thick Cork accent. “We had 265 different landowners to speak to, all on the route. Some of the farmers couldn’t believe their land might appeal to hikers. They’d say, ‘Why would anyone want to walk my old hill?’” He chuckles. “One of the aims was also to keep our old pathways alive. Lots of them were funeral paths, mass paths, church paths. That was very important.”

The trail took 18 months to complete. While never overcrowded, it has won wide recognition, including a European Destination of Excellence Award in 2009 for “respecting its protected environment while meeting the needs of local residents and visitors”. All landowners on the route still receive an upkeep payment from the government’s rural affairs department, a committee of volunteers oversees the trail and a small, grant-funded team of workers is tasked with maintaining it.

The next day, I’m back on the trail. The 11-mile stretch from Kilcrohane to Durrus, my last staging post before a final day’s walk back to Bantry, is as all-enfolding as all that’s come before. There are historical gems – including a bronze age stone circle and the ruins of a bardic school that, by some local accounts, can claim to be one of Europe’s oldest universities – and more of those coastal views.

There’s a feeling you get when you complete a long-distance trail, a sweet fatigue that holds a sense of the miles walked. This is a special corner of a special county, and the trail that snakes its way around the peninsula – soggy in places, steep in others, but rarely less than spectacular – is one to be celebrated.

The trip was provided by Tourism Ireland and Ireland Walk Bike Hike, which offers seven-day Sheep’s Head Way sel-guided packages, with five days of hiking, B&B accommodation, transfers and luggage transfers from €885. Five-day packages also available. For more information on the Sheep’s Head Way, visit thesheepsheadway.com

‘If you take all these springs together in terms of flow, it’s by far the largest in Ireland, and one of the biggest systems in the world,” said Dr Benjamin Thébaudeau, geologist for the newly designated Unesco Joyce Country and Western Lakes Geopark in western Ireland.

Over a few days, I discovered that this massive system of limestone springs and caves is the engine that drives this landscape, in the same way as an underground train network powers a city. It’s a place where rivers disappear into limestone fissures and subterranean lakes, and where roads twist through drowned valleys beneath mountains shaped by fire and ice.

It’s also the dreamy, lush landscape of western Ireland that famously drew Hollywood to the village of Cong for The Quiet Man in 1952. Travelling through the geopark from the heart of County Galway into southern County Mayo, I based myself in Cong, which is effectively an inland island between Lough Mask and Lough Corrib. The village takes its name from the Irish for “narrows”, a reference to its tight, water-bound geography and the concentration of springs that rise and fall invisibly beneath the surface.

Water is everywhere and rarely still. It drains from Lough Mask through swallow holes before travelling unseen for miles through limestone fissures beneath Cong, eventually forcing its way back to the surface as cold springs around the village.

“If you look in the centre, you can see the current flowing in opposite directions,” Benjamin says, pointing beyond the interpretive boards towards the channels where he first noticed the phenomenon. “We call it the Hatchery because of its connection to wild fish, and the springs bubble up there, right in the middle.”

Yet I quickly realised that it is not only the geopark’s karst terrain and glacial valleys that give it such distinct character. At its core sits a living Gaeltacht where Irish is still spoken in daily life, embedded in place names, local conversation and nightly sessions at the third-generation Burke’s Bar (Tí Bhúrca) in nearby Clonbur. The language runs through the landscape as another ingrained system alongside rock, water and soil.

The Augustinian abbey at Cong was founded under Gaelic royal patronage, yet its surviving stone arches reflect the deep architectural imprint left by later Norman reconstruction. In the 12th century, Ruaidrí Ua Conchobair (anglicised to Rory O’Connor), the last high king of Ireland, spent his final 15 years within these walls following political collapse in Connacht, seeking a quiet sanctuary where the river meets the woods. Centuries later, the tides of power shifted brutally under Tudor administration. The abbey was suppressed, and Sir Richard Bingham, the notorious lord president of Connacht, turned Ashford Castle into a menacing administrative hub, temporarily pulling the region’s political gravity to Cong before authority drifted westward once more. The castle was bought in 1852 by the Guinness family with proceeds from the global flow of the black stuff. They transformed the medieval ruins into a grand Victorian hunting lodge, the luxury retreat we see today.

Like the landscape of the geopark itself, these stone landmarks remain, but they constantly change their form, mirroring the fluid cultural afterlife of Cong village. At The Quiet Man Museum, curator Lisa Collins spoke of the enduring pull of John Ford’s film. Honeymooning visitors still arrive dressed as Sean Thornton (played by John Wayne) and Mary Kate Danaher (Maureen O’Hara), she said, stepping into a version of Ireland that has long outlived the production and indeed the country itself. The museum has been designated a Treasure of European Film Culture by the European Film Academy, with plans to mark the 75th anniversary of the film in Cong next year.

Among the exhibits is the fishing rod used by the village priest during filming on the River Cong. Held for decades by the family of sound man Thomas A Carman before its donation to the museum, the prop brings one of the movie’s most famous comedic exchanges into the room. In that celebrated scene, Mary Kate speaks in the Irish language to Father Peter Lonergan as he casts for a legendary, elusive salmon. Standing by the water, she desperately explains that she has refused to consummate the marriage while her husband sleeps in a “mála codlata”, which translates as sleeping bag.

The language allows the exchange to move into a different register, beneath the radar of 1952 censorship, yet fully understood within the Gaeltacht where the film was shot. It functions as a form of cover, allowing meaning to sit just beneath the surface.

That subterranean world becomes tangible at the Pigeon Hole cave system just outside the village. The entrance drops steeply into the limestone through shiny, time-worn steps, leading into a narrow chasm. Below, a shallow underground river moves through darkness, untouched by sunlight.

It is here that the legend of the White Trout of Cong gathers around the water. The story tells of a young woman who vanished following the murder of her lover, only for a pure white trout to appear in the cave soon afterwards. It’s reminiscent of Father Lonergan’s mythical fish in The Quiet Man, and like everything here in Joyce Country and the Western Lakes, it’s part myth and part truth.

Benjamin notes that elements of the legend may not be entirely detached from observation. Fish living for generations in complete darkness can lose pigmentation over time, becoming pale or entirely white as a result of their environment. In that sense, the story does not sit apart from geology. Another truth is that fishing remains central here, both as practice and inheritance.

Near Ashford Castle, a salmon hatchery attempts to support declining wild populations. The cold water that springs from the lakes should sustain fish stocks, but there are increasing environmental pressures.

“Maybe we are fighting a losing battle,” Benjamin said.

Climate change, warming seas and mounting pressure on river systems are all affecting wild Atlantic salmon. Trout remain more resilient, spending their lives within local waters such as Loughs Mask and Corrib rather than migrating out to sea.

Yet as the modern environment shifts, the landscape continues to hold older histories at different depths. Further inland at Carnacon, the ruins of the grand Moore Hall estate rise above Lough Carra from within encroaching woodland. One of the few Catholic-owned landed estates of its period, the house became associated with the great famine-era MP George Henry Moore and his colourful descendants, including the writer George Augustus Moore. Today, it sits partially collapsed since its destruction during the civil war, though the surrounding woods have absorbed rather than erased it. Paths thread through what was once a carefully controlled demesne, slipping into places where the estate’s geometry still survives beneath moss and root.

Not far away in Ballinrobe, another form of historical memory settles into language itself. It was here that Captain Charles Boycott, land agent for Lord Erne, became the focus of organised worker resistance during the land war in 1879. His name entered the global vocabulary as a verb, detached from its local origins yet still rooted in this terrain of contested land and memory. Moore Hall and Ballinrobe sit only a short distance apart, but together they reveal different expressions of the same pressures: ownership, resistance, inheritance, and the slow reshaping of meaning through time.

Further west, in Connemara, the landscape shifts dramatically once more as it reaches towards the Atlantic. At Killary Fjord, the land suddenly opens into deep water, a glacial incision dividing Connemara from Mayo. Here, the landscape’s buried secrets become visible. The fjord exposes geology directly, revealing the force with which ice once carved through the earth.

To the south, Kylemore Abbey appears against the hillside above Pollacappul Lough. Built first as a private residence before later becoming a Benedictine monastery, it carries another layered story of adaptation and loss. Like Moore Hall, it reflects changing ownership and identity, though here the landscape mirrors it back perfectly in the still water.

Across these places, from Cong to Moore Hall, from Ballinrobe to Killary, patterns continue to repeat in altered forms. Water disappears underground before resurfacing elsewhere. Estates become ruins. Ruins become woodland. Language carries meanings beneath meanings. Stories survive by changing shape.

Returning again to Cong, I have a better understanding of how it forms part of a much larger system of geological flow, historical pressure and cultural inheritance. What holds this region together is not stillness, but movement beneath the surface.

And above Lough Nafooey (also called Lough Finny), not far from the hairpin bends etched into the volcanic ash surface of Aill Dubh (Black Cliff), long after the road narrows into silence once again, a cuckoo’s call crosses the hills, marking time in a landscape that never quite repeats itself in the same way twice.

Accommodation was provided by Michaeleen’s Manor B&B in Cong, County Mayo (twins and doubles €115 B&B, singles €70), and the Leenane Hotel in County Galway (doubles from €120 B&B)

McGann was not always as confident as her persona on TikTok suggests and credits Higgins for helping her come out of her shell.

The two first met at an Ireland sevens camp in Dublin at 16 and have stayed friends during their rise from playing for the sevens at the Olympics in 2024 to representing the 15s at a World Cup last year and various editions of the Six Nations.

“The first time I met Anna was a sevens camp at DCU [Dublin City University], there was a girl the side of the pitch not saying much. She didn’t speak really until our first Dubai Invitational and then you were like ‘who is this?'” Higgins joked.

“I was so shy. I think Eve and the girls were so good and a reason as to why I came out of my shell and was so comfortable and that didn’t happen until I was 21-22,” McGann explained.

“They helped shape me into the person I am and be more comfortable to be myself.”

Despite their closeness, Higgins says the two have never had a falling out, even though they share a room together during Ireland camps.

“Eve and I roomed together for five weeks at the World Cup and somehow we’re not sick of each other,” McGann said.

“We would know if we need to give each other space. That’s the best thing we have. We’ve known each other so long and have grown,” Higgins added.

As mentioned, both players made the transition from sevens to 15s rugby alongside countless others in Scott Bemand’s current squad.

Higgins believes that is the case for so many because it was the only real pathway available for players of her generation to play in a professional environment.

“It’s mostly because there’s not provincial teams for women. Sevens was an opportunity for women’s rugby players to train every week.

“Thankfully now there’s a women’s programme, so there’s 15s and sevens but at the time only seven players were contracted to train week in week out. That was the pathway for us to play semi-professional rugby.”