I must show you my accommodation in Dingle at the Eask View Hostel, just a 10 minute walk from the center of town, facing the sea and flanked to one side and behind by fields.

Yesterday, after my arrival by Bus Eireen in the late afternoon, I bought some groceries, walked to the hostel, checked in, and then had several hours of just enjoying the hostel. No-one else was about, and it was fun to pretend that this grand old house was mine!

I prepared a healthy dinner of salad and store-roasted chicken in the kitchen.

I worked on my ipad in the parlour and at the table in the bay window.

I read in the sunroom entrance, and in my pretty bedroom, both with a sea view.

How lucky I am!  Down the road, the Dingle Skellig hotel charges more than 200 Euro for a room, and here I can have all of the above, plus friendly young staff and a continental breakfast for 65 Euro a night.  No wonder I spent the whole of yesterday evening, and a good part of my day today, just relaxing in this wonderful hostel.

This morning,  I had booked an archaeology tour of the Dingle Pensinsula with Tim Collins.  There was rather less archaeology than I was hoping for, but nevertheless the tour was a very pleasant way to see a good portion of the Dingle Peninsula around the famous Slea Head road.  Tim picked me up first from the hostel, so I had a front seat in the van, which I almost regretted a few times as we travelled on the ocean-side of a narrow twisting cliff-top road, high up with the Atlantic just below.

But our first stop, before the cliff road, was to see a collection of Ogham stones, displayed on the grounds of the old Ventry estate.  Ogham is a written script of Old Irish which was carved on upright stones from roughly the 4th to 7th centuries, often to mark territory, or on burial stones to record the name and ancestry of the deceased. The lines of various length and positioning represent the sounds of 20 letters in our current alphabet.

We made a stop to view and photograph Slea Head and the Blasket Islands. Slea Head is the western-most point of Ireland, and I had wanted to walk out to that point (as a complement to my visit to Cape Spear in Newfoundland, the eastern-most point in North America), but time did not allow for a walk out to the end of Slea Head.  I’ll have to do that on my next visit to Dingle!

This was my favourite view of the day, of Clogher Beach, and a trio of small peaks, far back in the centre, “The Three Sisters”.

We stopped at the Reask Monastic site, which dates from the 6th century.  A lone standing stone, inscribed with a cross at the top, and Celtic symbols below, which was half buried in the soil, marked the place where the remains of the settlement were hidden from view, buried beneath sod, until the 1970s when a team of archaeologists excavated the site over three seasons and revealed the foundations of walls, a rectangular oratory, and circular beehive huts which housed the monks.  At least 23 similar sites have been found along the edges of the Dingle peninsula.

Our final stop of the tour was at the Gallus Oratory, the only remaining one of its kind in the world that it perfectly intact.  Built in the 7th or 8th century, without mortar, it has a beautiful shape and is completely waterproof.  It is aligned east/west, with a western doorway and an eastern window.  It has been standing here for 900 years!

Our tour lasted almost three hours, with Tim providing commentary about the peninsula’s places, history, landscape, and plants.  It was a very enjoyable and easy way to get to know a little more about this beautiful, western-most corner of Ireland.