The Ring of Kerry is one of the highlights when visiting Ireland. While many cities offer day tours driving the ring road yourself is part of the fun and means you can choose where you stop and go at your own pace.
How to drive around the Ring of Kerry
We landed at Cork Airport at 9.30am, picked up our hire car from Sixt and had driven to Killarney by 11am. There are several other car hire companies based at Cork Airport. Ireland drive on the left same as the UK but the speedometer and speed limits are all in Kilometres rather than miles which isn’t too bad. We round all the national and regional roads to be really good quality, however, if you’re from the States you might find the roads narrow. We were driving a VW Polo which was the perfect size car for this drive, you might find it harder in a motorhome or big truck.
Kissane Sheep Farm
After a quick walk around Killarney and lunch at Petite Delice we drove towards Kissane Sheep Farm for their 2pm Sheep Dog Demonstration. The farm does this demonstration every day and you can check out what time it will be on their website. This farm is directly on the Ring of Kerry road (which you can find on Google Maps). Along the way we stopped at Ladies View which had stunning panoramic views and plenty of space to park for free.
We got back in the car and carried on to Kissane Sheep Farm. The Farm is locked and says “closed” until 15 minutes before the show starts where they open the gates and let cars drive in. You all block each other in the car park but everyone leaves pretty quickly after the show. Tickets were €7 each and you could pay by card. The sheep dog demonstration was highly impressive, seeing these working dogs doing what they love and are so good at was amazing. The surrounding views are also highly impressive. After this there is a sheep sheering demo which was really interesting. Here we learnt lots about the importance of sheering. Little did we know that if sheep aren’t sheered they get parasites which become infected and they die. We also learnt about the change in wool trade and how the farm survives on the tourism industry now which made us feel extra glad we arranged our Ring of Kerry stops to make sure we could see this show.
Sneem
As the weather was so unseasonably warm and sunny we wanted to make a beach stop. Driving to Caherdaniel we saw a landmark on Google Maps along the way that said “pyramids of Sneem“. Intrigued we made a stop in the very cute village of Sneem to find a sign saying “Where the Fairies went”. These pyramids were small but big enough for kids to run through and were in front of a lake and scenic viewpoint. This was a lovely stop to take a few photos and stretch our legs. Again, if we hadn’t have driven ourselves we wouldn’t have seen this. In fact, we didn’t see any other tour groups on any of our stops.
The Cove
We couldn’t get parked at the first beach stop we saw so carried on down at parked at O’Carroll’s Cove. Parking is limited but luckily a space become available as we arrived. This beautiful cove glimmered in the late afternoon sunrise and was pretty busy as there is a caravan park nearby. We got half pints of cider at O’Carroll’s bar which we drank at the beach wall before dipping our toes in the cold but crystal clear water.
Com an Chiste Lookout
As we wanted to be back in Killarney for 6pm this was our last stop. If you start the Ring of Kerry earlier in the day you can go round the whole thing in one long day but we enjoyed taking time to explore Killarney in the late morning and going to the 45 minute Sheep Dog Demo. If we had longer it would have been nice to carry on to see the Skellig Islands and Kerry Cliffs but this final viewpoint was really spectacular. You park by the statue and get panoramic views either side.
Ballaghasheen Pass
Knowing we wanted to drive back to Killarney we could have either drove back the way we came or cut through the middle to save 15 minutes. We chose to cut through the middle thinking the road would be the same quality as the Ring of Kerry. We were very much mistaken. The roads were narrow enough for one car with little divers to move to the side if oncoming traffic approached. In a hire car, this was a little nerve wracking. The height of our nerves was driving through the winding Ballaghasheen Pass, with views of the highest mountain range in Ireland. Despite our nerves the views were truly spectacular. With flat ranges of land spinning into super high mountain passes it felt like we were in Lord of the Rings. The landscape was similar to the fjord landscapes in New Zealand where the films were actually filmed.
The only time we had an intruder in the road was when a Peacock (yes, not a sheep but a peacock) would not moved until we round down the window.
Killarney, our base for the Ring of Kerry
Getting back after our exhilarating drive through the back roads of Kerry we went into town for dinner and drinks. JM Reidy’s in a sweet shop converted into a pub with live music where we enjoyed our first Guinness of the trip. We then went to Bricin in Killarney which was beautifully decorated. We had to book in person in the shop downstairs earlier in the day as it does book out and we are glad we did. Seafood chowder, Irish mussels, colcannon (mashed potato with cabbage), chicken boxty (a potato pancake with savoury filling) and finished off with Irish coffees. On our way back to the hotel we stopped into the Killarney Duck Store, a shop full of rubber ducks impersonating different characters and celebrities which was a real novelty.
We stayed at the Killarney Court Hotel which was a 10 minute walk into town with a petrol station next door (perfect for those on a road trip).