Wild Beauty: Kerry: the Ring of Kerry, Dingle, Skelligs & Killarney

A jacket-pocket guide to County Kerry - Ireland's highest mountains, its wildest offshore islands, and one of the most concentrated stretches of dramatic coastline in Europe.Killarney National Park holds three lakes, ancient oak woodland, and Torc Waterfall in a landscape that has been drawing travellers since the eighteenth century. This guide takes you past the jaunting-car circuit to the quiet trails above the lakes and the mountain views the coach tours never reach.The Ring of Kerry, Valentia Island and the Skellig Ring wind through Cahersiveen, Portmagee and Waterville to Skellig Michael - a rock eleven kilometres out in the Atlantic where monks built a monastery six hundred feet above the sea and kept it going for six centuries. This guide covers the crossing, the mainland viewpoints when the boats can't run, and the beaches and villages the main road bypasses.The Dingle Peninsula gives you the highest road pass in Ireland, beehive huts older than written memory, the abandoned Blasket Islands, and a working fishing town with one of the best small food scenes in the country.The Kerry side of the Beara Peninsula is the quiet one - bare mountain roads, a Bronze Age stone circle framed by peaks, and the Healy Pass climbing out of Kenmare Bay into open, empty high ground.This guide covers nine walks, from the easy Muckross Lake loop to the mountain approach at the Conor Pass. It lists camping and campervan sites that don't appear in the major booking engines - the kind that locals know. It recommends places to eat and sleep across a range of budgets, chosen because the food is good and the welcome is real.The Wild Beauty series covers the Wild Atlantic Way one region at a time. Each volume is small enough for a jacket pocket, specific enough to be useful, and written by someone who knows the coast well.Volume 1 of this series covers County Clare - the Burren, the Cliffs of Moher and Loop Head - where the You Deserve This novels, also by this author, are set.