Day Two - Dunloe Gap
We left Mallow and proceeded to drive roughly southward toward Macroom. I had been told, and read, that there was some lovely lake country around Macroom, but we just drove through it, and there was nothing particularly captivating here (from the road, and in the winter, anyway). So, it is probably a wasted detour unless you have time to stop and explore at length. We also took another detour to try to find something that wasn't on our “agenda” but which was announced by a sign off the main road. We thought it would be fun to go looking for something this far off the beaten track, but it actually turned into a rather unnerving adventure of driving on deeply rutted, narrow, unmarked, and isolated roads to finally locate a rather dull pair of ruins. Only for the true Irish Antiquity Completist, I decided. But it did allow us to climb a fence and tramp around a field, which would lead to later having to tell a bald-faced lie when asked by customs agents if we “visited any farms”.
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I have no idea where this is.
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Once we located the main road again, we headed northwest to Killarney and on past it a bit to pick up the road through the Gap of Dunloe. Heading south on the road in question, we were met with an ominous sign warning that the road past that point was “not maintained” and “not fit for vehicular traffic”. The warning was printed in several languages, and Thierry said that the warning in French was a little less dire, and I had read about it in a guidebook or two, and it WAS on the map, so we decided to chance it. And I'm delighted that we did, because this turned out to be my single favorite spot we visited. The road was windy and narrow, and I understood the reason for the warning. I would not have wanted to be there in high season dealing with oncoming traffic, and nowhere to back up or pull over. But for this time of year, it was quite a pleasant drive and the road was much better than the one we'd accidentally found ourselves on that morning. (Meaning, it was paved all the way through.) This was a spot to which pictures do no justice, but here are some anyway:
After the gap, we stopped to have a look back, at a scenic overlook a bit further on:
