A tour of Ireland's newest national park

A view of the "otherworldly" Skellig Michael

(Image credit: DeAgostini / Getty Images)

published 2 November 2024

At its southwestern tip, Ireland frays and fragments into a series of mountainous peninsulae and wild islands that are home to some of its most treasured cultural sites and richest coastal habitats. In April this year, scattered parts of the area, including large offshore reefs, were designated as the country's eighth national park and first marine national park, said Mike Unwin in The Guardian.

I visited several bits of the Kerry Seas in the course of an enchanting road trip, which took in three easy boat tours. This corner of Ireland is a "top" whale-watching destination, with both minke and fin whales seen regularly in summer, and humpbacks – their "showier cousins" – in the autumn. The park's greatest "jewel" is Skellig Michael, a vertiginous island that was "the very edge of the known world" for the monks who inhabited it from the sixth to the 12th centuries. Featured in the Star Wars films as Luke Skywalker's sanctuary, it is an "otherworldly" place. Beneath its breathtaking pyramidal peak there stands a ruined church, alongside six beehive-shaped monastic cells in which European storm petrels nest today. Scarcely less magical are the Blasket Islands, which lie off the end of the Dingle Peninsula. They were abandoned in the 1950s, but the memoirs written in the late 19th century by several of their inhabitants, including Tomás O'Crohan and Peig Sayers, are now key works in the Gaelic canon.

The view as I drove along the Dingle Peninsula itself was "stunning", with "mist spilling over the mountains inland and cloud shadows scudding over a slate-and-silver sea". I passed "hidden coves, proud headlands and iron-age ruins", and at each bend I was confronted with another "fabulous" Atlantic vista. Later, I saw huge bluefin tuna "ploughing after shoaling mackerel" in the waters off Kinsale (which lies outside the park). But nothing beat the boat trip out to Great Blasket, as dolphins and grey seals crowded around us and a minke whale passed by, its "long gleaming back" like a "submarine" surfacing among the waves.