Slea Head Walking Loop

Welcome to the Slea Head walking loop. You're on the Dingle Peninsula — Corca Dhuibhne in Irish — the most westerly point of mainland Europe, a place where the Irish language is still the everyday speech of many residents, and where the landscape mixes ancient archaeology, dramatic coastline, and a sea so blue it looks doctored in photographs. This audio tour covers the classic coastal walk around Slea Head itself — an eight-kilometre linear route from Dunquin to Clogher Beach, which you'd pair with a taxi or shuttle back to your car. Allow three hours, plus stops.

The name Slea Head comes from the Irish Ceann Sléibhe — the headland of the mountain. The mountain in question is Mount Eagle, whose lower slopes drop directly into the Atlantic here, creating the most dramatic coastline on the Dingle Peninsula. In fact, on a clear day, from Slea Head, you are looking directly at the next landmass due west — and that landmass is North America, some three thousand miles across the ocean.

Start at the car park above Dunquin Pier. Dunquin itself is a small, strung-out village. The pier is at the bottom of a famously steep, zig-zag concrete pathway that has been photographed by nearly every person who has visited the Dingle Peninsula in the last fifty years. From the pier, small black boats — hand-built naomhógs — still row out to the Blasket Islands for fishing, for lobster pots, for passengers.

The Blasket Islands. Look west. You see a row of low, humped islands a mile and a half offshore. Those are the Blaskets. Great Blasket, the largest, was inhabited until 1953 — a small community of perhaps two hundred people at its peak, speaking a particularly pure form of Munster Irish, living by fishing, potato farming, and the occasional boat trip to the mainland. In the early twentieth century, a remarkable literary flowering took place on the island — three books by three different islanders, describing their own lives and community, are now classics of world literature in translation: Peig Sayers' Peig, Tomás Ó Criomhthain's An tOileánach, and Muiris Ó Súilleabháin's Fiche Blian ag Fás. All three are available in English, and all three are worth reading before you come.

Set off south along the cliff path. The first kilometre takes you along the top of high sea cliffs — at some points over a hundred metres above the Atlantic. In summer, the cliffs are home to colonies of fulmar, gannet, and kittiwake. In the sea below, you may — especially in calm weather — see common dolphins, bottle-nose dolphins, and occasionally a pod of killer whales. Dingle Bay is one of the best dolphin-watching locations in Europe.

About two kilometres along, the path passes the ruins of the Clochán — a drystone Irish beehive hut, believed to be over a thousand years old. There are roughly two thousand of these on the Dingle Peninsula, and the best-preserved of them is just off this walk. Duck inside one. It is dry, solid, and extraordinarily compact engineering. Early Irish monks and farmers built these huts across the west of Ireland.

Continue south. The path passes through grazing land — mostly sheep, some cattle. Close gates behind you. Keep dogs on leads. The farming here is a genuine working economy, not a decoration.

At around the halfway point, the path reaches its closest approach to Slea Head itself. Stop. The view is best described in superlatives. To your right, the Atlantic opens out. Directly ahead, the south coast of the peninsula sweeps away towards Ventry Bay. To your left, the slopes of Mount Eagle rise to nearly five hundred metres. Above you — sometimes — ravens.

A word on film. This coast was the location for much of the 1970 David Lean film Ryan's Daughter, starring Robert Mitchum and Sarah Miles. The village built for the film, at Coumeenoole Beach, was dismantled after filming, but the landscape it sat in is largely unchanged. In 2017, the Dingle Peninsula was again used as a filming location — for the final two Star Wars films, The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker. Luke Skywalker's island retreat was filmed on Skellig Michael, twenty miles south of here; but the beaches where Rey trains were filmed on the Dingle coast.

The path now descends to Coumeenoole Beach — one of the finest white-sand beaches on the Irish west coast. If you have time and the weather allows, walk the beach. The sand is fine, the water is cold, the views are the best you will get in Kerry.

From Coumeenoole, the last two kilometres take you around the shoulder of Mount Eagle and down to Clogher Beach. Clogher is smaller, wilder, and generally emptier than Coumeenoole. The rocks at the south end of the beach are famously photogenic at sunset. If you timed your walk right, you are here for that.

The road pick-up is at Clogher car park, a few hundred metres behind the beach. Call your taxi or shuttle. Pick up a coffee from the occasional roving coffee van that parks there in summer.

Thank you for walking with us. The Dingle Peninsula is, by widespread agreement, one of the great walking landscapes on Earth. Don't just do this walk — come back and do the Dingle Way.