The Ring of Dingle

In Dingle town, we stayed in a very nice B&B—the Heaton Guest House—with rooms overlooking the Dingle Estuary. Dinner that first night was at Danno's Pub and was very good. Dingle (pop. 1,400) is a market town and fishing port and is well-supplied with pubs—about 50 of them, some so small that only a half-dozen people can fit inside. We visited several and enjoyed them all. There is a complete ban on smoking in Ireland wherever people are employed, including all restaurants and pubs. That makes visiting the pubs very pleasant for non-smokers like us. And it doesn't seem to hurt the trade; all the pubs we visited were busy.

Breakfast was included with our rooms and cooked to order. Our hands-down favorite from the menu was "Heaton's Treat"--porridge (oatmeal) topped with brown sugar and drizzled with Drambuie and fresh cream.

On Saturday, our first full day in Dingle, we hiked around the town in the morning. The afternoon turned wet. We had planned to take a bus tour of the Ring of Dingle, a driving tour that takes in several medieval and neolithic sites around the outer end of the peninsula. Instead, our host lined us up with a local tour guide who stuffed us into his little sedan and gave us a wonderful tour full of history, local characters, and interesting places. It was misting or drizzling during much of the four-hour tour. (The Irish call that a "soft day.") But we were dressed for it and enjoyed the day in spite of the damp.

The Dingle Peninsula has been occupied for more than 6,000 years. In its archaeological remains, it is one of the richest areas on the west coast of Europe, with almost 2,000 sites, including the largest collections in the world of clocháns or beehive huts, of the stones with the unique ogham writing, and of dúnta or ring forts. Among the high points of our tour were:

• An Iron-Age (500 B.C.-500 A.D.) ring fort built around 400 A.D. — These forts were built to protect the inhabitants' cattle from thieves. The builders dug a round ditch enclosing an acre or so. They piled the dirt in two concentric walls up to ten feet high. Between the walls, the ditch could be 30 feet deep. Some ring forts show evidence of wooden palisades on top of the inner ring. Others are topped with drystone (unmortared) walls. Many appear to have been occupied for 500 years or more.

Today local tradition says the ring forts are home to the spirits of the people who lived in them—the "faerie rings" of folklore. To tear down a ring fort is said to bring several generations of bad luck on the culprit's family. So they remain. In some parts of Britain, locals leave gifts at the ring forts on the winter solstice. Some 45,000 ring fort sites have been identified in Ireland, alone.

• Ogham Stones — Ogham script was the first written language of the Gaels and Picts in Ireland, Scotland, England, and Wales. It was used between 300 and 700 A.D. The script uses various marks on a central index line, often on the sharp edge or corner of a stone, to form a 25-letter alphabet. The inscriptions are names of people or places and may have marked graves or boundaries of land. Some inscriptions in Pictish and ancient Gaelic have not been deciphered.

The ogham stones we saw were gathered by the local laird — Lord Vestry — and placed as decorations near his "big house" in the mid-1800s. The standing stones are the more common type, and use an edge as the index line. The round stones lying flat, may have been grave markers. The chap in the floppy hat is Dennis, our guide. He was great!

• An Dún Beag - Dunbeg Promontory Fort — The most common Iron-Age relics in Ireland are hill forts and promontory forts—large drystone walls enclosing a considerable area of a hilltop or cliff ledge. Dunbeg is a small but impressive fort on a sheer cliff promontory projecting into Dingle Bay. The defenses face only the landward side, since the cliffs provided natural and imposing defenses.
At Dunbeg, an attacker would have faced four lines of earthen banks, five fosses (defensive ditches) and a drystone rampart with a complex entrance flanked by guard chambers. Behind the rampart is a single largish clochaun (beehive hut).
The photo above looks into the gate through the rampart. (The wooden bracing is modern, to stabilize this heavily-visited site.) There is a souterrain (cellar) under the beehive, and a tunnel extending up the promontory that may have been an escape route. Both were built as a ditches and covered over with large flat stones.

Very little dateable material has been found at Dunbeg. The few traces that can be carbon-dated suggest that the site was occupied as early as 580 B.C. and as late as the 11th century A.D. Parts of the site, including one end of the rampart, have fallen into the sea in the ensuing centuries.

The photo below looks across the clochaun, away from the sea. This beehive is unusual in that it is round on the outside, but with square corners in the inside space. The souterrain is underneath the doorway and extends under the wall. You can see the souterrain's capstones just inside the doorway. The near wall shows typical drystone construction, actually two faced walls with the space between filled with rubble. The wall thickness at this height is about five feet.

Next: More Ring of Dingle
Cheers,
—David

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