🇮🇪 Ireland · Southwest (Kerry)
The Ring of Kerry is Ireland's most famous scenic route: 179 kilometres of loop road embracing the Iveragh peninsula, among steep mountains, lakes, golden beaches, cliffs above the Atlantic and villages of coloured houses. It is not a destination you walk but one you drive (or cycle, for the braver): a string of viewpoints, thousand-year-old stone forts and fishing villages that sums up, in a single loop, everything people love about the Irish west.
Here is one of the most astonishing places in the country: Skellig Michael, a jagged crag 12 km off the coast where monks built, some 1,400 years ago, a monastery of stone beehive huts that is now a Unesco World Heritage Site and a 'Star Wars' location. But the ring is much more: the Iron Age ring forts such as Staigue, the house of Daniel O'Connell 'the Liberator' at Derrynane, Valentia Island from which the first telegraph cable linking Europe and America set out in 1866, and the majestic Killarney National Park with its lakes and its old Victorian mansion.
This guide covers the Ring of Kerry with a practical, warm eye: which way round to drive it so you do not fight with the coaches, how and when to attempt the difficult landing on Skellig Michael, which villages and forts not to miss, where to stop for seafood by the sea and how to organise the visit in one, two or three days. One piece of advice before you set off: slow down. In Kerry, the journey is the destination.
The Iveragh peninsula has been inhabited since prehistory: the dry stone ring forts such as Staigue, Cahergal and Leacanabuaile, raised between the Iron Age and the early Middle Ages, bear witness to it. In the sixth and seventh centuries, monks of the early Irish Church withdrew to pray and fast on the crag of Skellig Michael, where they built a monastery of beehive-shaped cells that survived even the Viking raids (the first recorded around 823-824) before being abandoned around the twelfth century. The area later lived under the rule of Gaelic clans and Anglo-Norman lords; in the nineteenth century it gave Ireland one of its heroes, Daniel O'Connell 'the Liberator', born near Cahersiveen and raised at Derrynane, who won Catholic Emancipation in 1829. The Great Famine (1845-1852) hit Kerry hard and pushed thousands to emigrate to America. In 1866, Valentia Island entered world history: from there the first lasting transatlantic telegraph cable was laid, cutting communication between Europe and North America from days to minutes. From Queen Victoria's visit in 1861 onwards, the Kerry landscape began drawing travellers; today the ring is an icon of Irish tourism and part of the Wild Atlantic Way. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓Atlantic Kerry: the monastery of Skellig Michael hanging above the ocean, the living Irish language on the Dingle peninsula, the Great Famine that hit the west especially hard, and Valentia, starting point of the first transatlantic telegraph cable.
Read the history of Southwest (Kerry) →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before there were roads, tour coaches or the name 'Ring of Kerry' itself, the Iveragh peninsula was already inhabited. Its people left, scattered across the slopes and the valleys, some of the oldest and most mysterious monuments in Ireland: Bronze Age stone circles, such as the one at Kenmare (some 3,000 years old, fifteen stones around a central dolmen), megalithic tombs, inscribed stones and, above all, the great dry stone ring forts known as cashels or stone forts.
The most impressive is Staigue Fort, hidden in a lonely valley near Sneem: a circular wall some 27 metres across and up to 5.5 metres high, raised without a single drop of mortar, with walls almost four metres thick and an ingenious network of internal stairs arranged in an X. Archaeologists debate its exact date, but it is usually placed between the end of the Iron Age and the early Middle Ages (roughly between the first century BC and the sixth century AD). It must have been the fortified residence of a chief or a powerful family, a status symbol as much as a defence.
Near Cahersiveen two other notable forts survive: Cahergal (Cathair Gheal), a reconstructed cashel dated to around AD 600, and Leacanabuaile, a fortified farmstead whose excavations turned up Bronze Age and Iron Age objects, proof that a farming community lived there for centuries; the enclosure you see today was raised around the ninth to tenth centuries, though part of its structures may be older. These forts are not anonymous ruins: they are the signature of an organised, cattle-raising, warrior society that commanded the landscape from its stone walls long before Christianity, the Vikings or the English arrived. Walking them today, among the sheep and the Atlantic wind, is to touch the deepest Ireland.
Off the west coast of the peninsula, about twelve kilometres out to sea, rises a pyramid of rock 218 metres high that looks like something out of a dream: Skellig Michael (Sceilg Mhichíl). There, between the sixth and eighth centuries, a handful of monks of the early Irish Church did something that still astonishes: they climbed to the top of the crag, cut more than six hundred steps into the rock and built, on a wind-battered ledge, a monastery of beehive-shaped cells (clocháin), oratories, crosses and a small cemetery, all in dry stone, without mortar, fitting the slabs together with a mastery that has withstood more than a thousand years of storms.
Tradition credits the foundation to St Fionán, and the site was dedicated to the archangel Michael, patron of high places. Life on Skellig was extremely hard: never more than twelve monks and an abbot lived there, living on fish, seabirds, eggs and the little a tiny garden produced, devoted to prayer, fasting and copying manuscripts, in almost total isolation. It was the ideal of Irish monasticism taken to the limit: seeking God in the most inhospitable 'desert' possible.
Isolation did not save them from violence. The annals record Viking attacks from the early years of the ninth century: the best remembered, around 823-824, says that 'Skellig was plundered by the heathens and abbot Eitgal was carried off and died of hunger'. Even so, the community held on and the monastery remained occupied for more than six hundred years, until, around the twelfth or thirteenth century, a colder climate and changes in monastic life led the monks to move to the mainland, to the abbey of Ballinskelligs. The crag remained a place of pilgrimage for centuries.
Today the monastery of Skellig Michael is one of the best-preserved examples of an early monastic settlement in Europe, declared a Unesco World Heritage Site in 1996, and a location for the 'Star Wars' saga. But its real magic is not in the films but in imagining those men climbing, day after day, the six hundred and eighteen steps towards the sky.
After the monks withdrew, the Iveragh peninsula remained, throughout the Middle Ages, under the rule of Gaelic clans and of the Anglo-Norman lords who had landed in Ireland from 1169. It was a land of castles such as Ballycarbery, of families such as the MacCarthys and the O'Sullivans, and of a way of life that combined cattle raising, fishing and a strong Irish-language identity that survives to this day in the Gaeltacht areas of the west coast.
The figure who gave Kerry its place in the modern history of Ireland was born right here: Daniel O'Connell (1775-1847), 'the Liberator'. He came into the world near Cahersiveen and was raised in his uncle's house at Derrynane, on the southern stretch of the ring, in a Catholic landowning family that had kept its lands despite the Penal Laws discriminating against Catholics. Trained as a lawyer, O'Connell became the great leader of the Catholic cause: he organised a peaceful mass mobilisation unprecedented in Europe and won, in 1829, Catholic Emancipation, the law that finally allowed Catholics to take seats in the Westminster Parliament.
O'Connell was far more than a local politician: he is regarded as the pioneer of modern Irish democratic politics, a man who rejected violence and who later led, without success, the campaign to repeal the union with Britain. His house at Derrynane, today a state museum, keeps his furniture and personal belongings, surrounded by gardens and by one of the most beautiful beaches in Kerry. That one of Ireland's great national heroes came from this remote corner of the southwest says a great deal about the weight this peninsula has had in the country's identity.
The nineteenth century brought Kerry, as it brought all of Ireland, the greatest catastrophe in its history: the Great Famine (An Gorta Mór, 1845-1852). A blight that rotted the potato, the almost sole food of millions of poor country people, caused a mass famine that fell especially hard on the western counties, Kerry among them, where the population depended entirely on that crop grown on marginal land.
The consequences were devastating. Between death from hunger and disease and desperate emigration, Ireland lost close to a quarter of its population in a few years. On the Iveragh peninsula, whole villages emptied: those who survived often took ship for America from Cork or Queenstown (today Cobh), leaving behind houses that are now grass-covered ruins on the hillsides. Daniel O'Connell himself, by then old and ill, devoted his last parliamentary efforts to pleading for help for the starving; he even tried to buy the government food depot at Cahersiveen to distribute it, a move the British Treasury refused. He died in 1847, in the depths of the famine.
Emigration did not end with the famine: it became a constant for more than a century. Generations of young people from Kerry left for the United States, England or Australia in search of the future their own land could not offer them, and the diaspora wove permanent ties between the peninsula and the other side of the Atlantic. That demographic wound — countryside that never recovered its population, abandoned villages, families divided by the ocean — is an essential part of Kerry's memory, and it largely explains why so many descendants of Irish emigrants in America feel these shores are where they come from.
In the middle of that century of tragedy and emigration, the peninsula also played the lead in one of the greatest technological feats in history. It happened on Valentia Island, at the western end of the ring, and it changed the world: from here the first transatlantic telegraph cable that worked lastingly was laid, joining Europe with America.
The idea was almost mad for its time: to sink a cable thousands of kilometres long on the ocean floor to transmit messages in minutes between two continents that until then communicated by ship, with weeks of delay. After several failed attempts — a first cable in 1858 worked for barely a few weeks — definitive success came in 1866. On 27 July that year, the giant steamship 'Great Eastern' finished laying a robust cable that ran from Valentia to Heart's Content, in Newfoundland (Canada), after crossing some 1,686 nautical miles (more than 3,000 km) of ocean. That same year the lost cable from the previous attempt was also recovered and completed.
The impact was immense. Queen Victoria and the president of the United States exchanged messages of congratulation; what had taken days of sailing now took minutes. It was, for its time, comparable to what the Moon landing would be a century later: the first time information travelled almost instantly between the Old World and the New. Valentia became a node of world communications and kept its telegraph station running for almost a century, until 1966.
Today the old cable station and the first landing point can be visited, and the group of sites linked to the transatlantic cable (in Ireland and Newfoundland) is seeking recognition as a World Heritage Site. That this lost corner of Kerry, from which so many people had had to emigrate, should at the same time be the door through which the world entered the age of telecommunications, is one of the loveliest paradoxes in the peninsula's history.
The landscape that today draws travellers from all over the world began to become famous in the nineteenth century, thanks to Romanticism and a handful of illustrious visitors. A key milestone was Queen Victoria's visit in 1861 to Killarney National Park: the Ladies View viewpoint owes its name to the admiration expressed by her ladies-in-waiting at the lakes, and that royal visit made the area fashionable among British high society. Little by little, the lakes of Killarney, the MacGillycuddy's Reeks and the Iveragh coast became a picturesque destination, toured first in horse-drawn carriages (the jaunting cars still running in Killarney) and later by car.
The circular route we now call the Ring of Kerry was consolidated in the twentieth century as one of Ireland's tourist routes par excellence: 179 kilometres of road linking viewpoints, beaches, colourful villages, stone forts and the turn-off to Skellig Michael. The peninsula managed to keep both its rural character and its language: much of the west coast remains Gaeltacht, an Irish-speaking area, and the cattle-raising and fishing way of life coexists with tourism.
In recent decades, two phenomena pushed its fame even further. One was cinema: Skellig Michael appeared as a location in the 'Star Wars' saga, multiplying the desire to climb its steps (and forcing safety measures and quotas to be tightened). The other was the creation, in 2014, of the Wild Atlantic Way, the great 2,500 km coastal route along the Irish west, of which the Ring of Kerry is one of the star stretches.
That success also brings challenges: in high summer the narrow roads become clogged with coaches and cars, which is why it is recommended to drive the ring anticlockwise, start early and spread the visit over several days. But you only have to stop at a lonely viewpoint, listen to the wind and the sea, and watch the silhouette of the Skelligs cut against the horizon to understand that, beyond fashions and crowds, Kerry is still what it always was: one of the most beautiful and evocative edges of Europe.