A damp, grey, Sunday afternoon seemed as good a time as any to find out about a strong West Cork tradition – Road Bowling – the title of this post is the Irish for that. I had come across this ancient sport on a previous visit to Ireland and was intrigued. Friends enlightened me that it was a traditional local pastime which has spread to Armagh and, through emigration, to London and the United States – while other versions of the game exist in Holland and Germany. But the county of Cork – and particularly our western part of the county – is its true home.

A notable merit of the sport is that it requires absolutely minimal equipment and facilities: an iron ball (or ‘bullet’) weighing 800 grams and 18cm in circumference (note: Ireland is fully up to date with its metrification – miles and ounces have vanished along with the…

View from Cappaghglass

Several of my Canadian readers have asked me to do a piece on place names. As a Canadian, it’s hard to fathom that the address ‘Finola Finlay, Ard Glas, Greenmount, Ballydehob, Co. Cork, Ireland’ could actually get to me – “What?” you say, “No street address? No postal code? And how on earth do you pronounce Ballydehob?” (Actually, just Ballydehob, Ireland, would probably make it to me.)

When Ireland was mapped by the Ordnance Survey in the 1820’s to 1840’s, place names were Anglicised mostly by trying to reproduce the Irish names phonetically. With some basic knowledge of Irish it is possible to winkle out the meaning of many place names. The smallest unit of land recorded on the maps is the ‘townland’. This being Ireland, the term ‘townland’ has nothing to do with a town but is a defined geographical area, probably based on very ancients divisions…

We’ve done several posts on the Sheep’s Head and the marked hiking trails that crisscross that peninsula. But we actually live on a different peninsula, The Mizen, and it is just as glorious and wild and beautiful.

The road to the Mizen Head starts at Ballydehob, runs along the southern side of the peninsula through Schull and Toormore and on to Goleen and Crookhaven. At the far or western end are the beaches of Barley Cove and the Mizen Head Lighthouse and Visitor Centre. There are no villages on the northern side of the peninsula until you reach Durrus, which also marks the start of the Sheep’s Head Peninsula. It is bounded on the south by the waters and islands of Roaringwater Bay and on the north by Dunmanus Bay. The whole peninsula is rich in history and archaeology and we plan future posts about many aspects of life here.

A pet day on The Mizen

We are once again being battered by Atlantic storms, but on a sparkling day earlier this week we drove, on a whim, to Durrus for breakfast. The day was so pure and sunny that it seemed a crime to go home again, so we set out to drive along the north side of the Mizen Peninsula.

Dunbeacon Castle

What a day! We rambled down to the shore to investigate the 15th Century Dunbeacon Castle. There’s nothing left except one tall wall, standing sentinel against the wind, facing down the length of Dunmanus Bay. Its commanding position would have given its builders, the O’Mahonys, a strategic advantage in protecting and controlling their territory from adventurers arriving from the Atlantic.

Not much left

Further along we explored an abandoned cottage, and found one of the water pumps that were once ubiquitous in the irish countryside…