Fodor's Travel Talk Forums - Those darn Dingle races. Can you tell me if my Plan B on the penninsula will work?

Here's a piece I wrote last year. The first restaurant is the Old Pier; the second is Gorman's, which is not far from it.

The western end of the Dingle Peninsula, including the town of Dingle, is a zone known as a "gaeltacht" where, regardless of what actually happens, Gaelic is deemed to be the everyday language of the people. To underpin that special status, a recent ministerial edict decrees that town be known only by its Gaelic name. That is slightly inconvenient, because there are two versions: "An Daingean" and "Daingean Uí Chúis", but that problem is resolved by signwriting expediency, "An Daingean" requiring fewer letters. So if you visit the area, and wish to go to Dingle, look for road signs indicating the way to An Daingean. I stand with the majority of local people, and when operating in English continue to refer to the town as Dingle.

In truth, if you disregard the schools, which do operate through Gaelic, and a fairly small number of enthusiasts who are most likely not native to the town, Dingle is not Gaelic-speaking, and has not been so in the lifetime of any of its residents or, indeed, their parents. The Gaelic language has survived much better in the area west of the town.

Dingle is located on a large and well-sheltered harbour, and enjoyed a modest prosperity for many years as a fishing and trading port and as the administrative and commercial centre of its region. Then came tourism, and over the past twenty years or so it has become one of the busiest tourist towns in Ireland, partly because of its own attractiveness, but also because it is the gateway to one of the most scenic parts of Ireland, the western end of the Dingle Peninsula, including the renowned Slea Head drive.

Herself and I had not been there for a couple of years, and we decided to remedy that deficit during the May Bank Holiday weekend. We stopped in Dingle for long enough to have a coffee and to buy some provisions before heading on to the small village of Muirioch, right beside the wide expanse of Smerwick Harbour with its beaches and mountain backdrop. We had the use of a house there. The main event on Friday was dinner in a local restaurant, where the idea of portion control is unknown -- mountains of tasty fish.

Saturday was bright, with scattered clouds and a breeze to move them about. It was a suitable day for touring. Muirioch is on the route of the Slea Head drive, and we decided to go around the circuit. To make it more interesting we chose to go in an anti-clockwise direction -- the recommended direction is clockwise, but we had seen it that way a few times before, and I was curious to see how it worked the other way. The road is narrow and winding, with many blind bends, and those who know it might consider my choice to go against the flow to be eccentric. But the local people do it all the time and seem to manage. There is an art to driving such roads, and Irish people who regularly drive in the countryside have mastered it. Many visitors have not: it was fascinating to behold the terror in the eyes of drivers of 2006-registered Micras as I came towards them, and many tried to get off the road until they noticed the very solid stone walls or the cliff edges, circumstances that persuaded them that the road was indeed wide enough for two cars to pass one another.

Scaring tourists was not my real object. I found that the drive seemed somewhat different in the wrong direction, overall a little less good, but it does present more interesting views of the Blasket Islands. I have a special affinity with the Blaskets, so that pleased me. The Great Blasket is a leftover mountain from the spine of the Dingle Peninsula. It was inhabited from as far back as records go (which is not very far), a marginal community to the marginal community at the farthest end of Ireland, until it was finally abandoned in 1953. The population probably never exceeded 200, but from the island we have a shelf of books written by islanders, by scholars who visited and lived among them, by descendants of islanders, and by more recent authors who have fallen under the spell of the island and its people. There was probably no other community anywhere with as high a ratio of publications to people.

We stopped for lunch at Dunquin. When I took out a fistful of coins to pay, I assured the cashier that we were Irish, and knew how to count the money. With her eyes, she indicated a group seated at a table. They were Americans, she told me, had tendered dollars, and were affronted when she asked for euros. As we ate, we watched the changing light patterns on Dunmore, the westernmost point in Ireland, pointing like a big finger into the Atlantic, the rocky islet of An Liúir at its tip, and beyond that, just below the surface, Stromboli rock, the exotic name recalling one of the ships that it brought to grief, then the Blaskets, and after that, "next parish, America", as the local saying goes.

On with the drive, around Slea Head itself, frightening some more tourists as we went. The area is rich in recorded history, in folklore, in legend, and in archaeology. On previous trips we had seen some of the more renowned sites, such as Gallarus Oratory and Riasc Cross, and to add to our experiences I agreed to confront my acrophobia so that we could visit Dunbeg, a promontory fort of uncertain date between one and three thousand years old (probably a bit of each, and some other dates as well). Worth an hour, more if you can enjoy cliff-top views as well as ancient fortifications.

Past Ventry with its huge sweep of beach, and into Dingle Town. Bookshops got visited (that's pretty well compulsory for us, except when the local language is one we cannot comprehend, and even then we sometimes have a look). Then into Dick Mack's for refreshments. If you get to Dingle, have a drink in Dick Mack's. It has hardly changed over god-knows-how-many years, except that the shoes on the shelves are no longer for sale. It is so old-style that it seems contrived and kitsch, but I know an emigrant who made her first visit home in 40 years and said it was the only place that didn't change in all her years away.

Thence to Brandon Creek, a mini-fjord from which St. Brendan the Navigator is believed to have sailed, nine centuries before Columbus, to discover America. I cannot explain it, but this small harbour has an extraordinary attraction for me. Back to Muirioch, completing the wrong-way-round circuit.

An excellent dinner at a nearby restaurant was followed by a visit to Ballydavid, a stroll on the beach, and a nightcap in a pub frequented by local fishermen, for whom Gaelic is the language of discourse. The phenomenon of the Gaelic-speaking community is almost a thing of the past, under pressure from many things, including tourism. In the gaeltacht area west of Dingle more houses are bought as holiday homes than as permanent residences, and most of the summer and weekend residents do not speak Gaelic.

Sunday was a grey day of low cloud and mizzling rain. That's about par for the course on Ireland's Atlantic coast: we had two full days, and one of them turned out to be wet. Visitors thronged into Dingle for tourism under cover, and we were among them. Sunday papers and dawdling over soup and brown bread in a pleasant café could fill a couple of hours. We got the papers, found our café, but they were sold out of soup. We were not the only ones with the same idea. Would we mind waiting until a fresh pot was made? Of course we wouldn't, I said, looking at the grey wet street outside. We settled in, read the papers, got soup that was worth the wait, and read some more. The rain continued, and more people came in. It would have been unfair to hold the table on the strength of soup that we had finished a while ago, so we ceded the place to newcomers.

The rain eased a bit, and we made a minor expedition to Burnham, the peninsula that is the western side of Dingle Harbour and the eastern side of Ventry Harbour. We reached the end of the road and stopped to enjoy the view, grey and grey-washed. A Polish-registered car pulled up beside us, and the driver sought directions: where to get a boat so that they could see dolphins? Readers may understand his question, and know his error: people visit Dingle to see a dolphin, just the one, that took up residence in the harbour about 20 years ago, and has been the greatest single tourist draw in the years since. He is known as Fungie, and is happy to swim with visitors, much preferring women to men. Several local boatmen make a good income from taking people out to see him. I told the Polish visitors that the boats went out from Dingle, but that today was not a good day to see him, because he did not come out in the rain as he disliked getting wet. He looked at me, bemused, for several seconds before deciding that it was all right to laugh.

The rain intensified, but we had an advantage over many other visitors: we know people in the area, and we could visit them. And so we passed our afternoon drinking tea and chatting by a warm fire.

We brought our wintry day to an end with another tasty fish dinner, this time in one of Dingle town's many seafood restaurants. It should not be surprising that one can get good seafood around a busy fishing port like Dingle, but we have been disappointed in other coastal towns to find a dearth of fish restaurants.

Monday dawned bright and clear, as if the previous day's cloud and rain could never have happened. But we could not take advantage of it, because we had to be in Dublin that evening, and the only way to achieve that comfortably on a bank holiday weekend was to get on the road before most people had finished their packing. Afternoon tea in Dublin, and west Kerry seemed more than five hours away.