Castletownbere and the Bere Island Parkrun

Castletownbere in West County Cork, Ireland, offers free 48 hour parking for motorhomes and campervans alongside a sea inlet in the town. From the cab I can see colorful fishing boats gleaming in sunlight on the quayside. A heron stalks fish at low tide a few metres from where I’m sat. We’re set back from the road behind buildings, so it’s lovely and quiet at night, a testament to how welcoming Ireland is to our form of tourism. Thank you Castletownbere!

The main feature of the town is the fishing port. It’s Ireland’s second-largest, with a large fleet of boats plying the Atlantic from the huge quays here. Being part of the EU, Ireland’s waters are shared with Spanish, French and other nation’s boats without reciprocal access to their waters for the Irish. Unsurprisingly, it’s a source of friction when it comes to quotas. None of this is visible to the casual visitor (me), the huge boats just have me staring at their industrial scale. I wonder how long I’d last working on board before I lost a finger, or worse?

Ju and I have been together for 20 years, give or take a few days, and to celebrate a couple of fantastic decades, we ate out! Get us! Not just that, but we were in the pub again on a Friday night, it’s becoming a habit! It’s not cheap in the pubs anywhere these days. But the purse strings have been eased open by Ireland’s seemingly endless supply of easy-going pubs, filled with intriguing knickknacks, old photos, heartfelt poems and laughing locals. We’ve not yet managed to catch any live music in one, but we will do before we head home, hopefully.

For pudding we headed to the small kiosk serving up about 1,000 different flavours of crepe in the town’s square. I’d seen bags of dried peat for sale in the garage next door, and when I asked the owner of the kiosk about them it kicked off a conversation. A fascinating chap, a German who’d moved here decades ago and makes a daytime living as a blacksmith (www.bearablacksmith.ie). His wife and daughter had just pulled up opposite the kiosk and dad and daughter had taken part in a kiss-blowing competition! His daughter has Downs syndrome and, despite resistance from everywhere he turned to for help and advice, he’s set up a small business selling the sculptures she makes, and gave us a leaflet about them (borntranscendent.com). The crepe was delicious.

This morning we woke to blazing sunlight, pulled on our runners and ambled over to the ferry to Bere Island. Each Saturday morning the locals over there organise a free 5km walk/jog/run as part of the international Parkrun initiative. We do these in the UK and have already done one on this trip in the grounds of Kilkenny Castle. When we saw there’s one on a rugged island in the Atlantic, we really wanted to have a go at it, so aimed to be here on a Saturday.

We weren’t alone! It’s only a small ferry from Castletownbere to the island. In our case big enough for a tractor, a car and an eclectic group of smiling walkers, joggers and runners. We’d done our research (for once), and this is the only ferry which gets to the island in time for the run on a Saturday morning. They land a few miles from the start point at the opposite end of the island, but provide a mini bus from the dock to and from the start. The ferry and mini bus cost all of €10 return per person, an absolute bargain (no need to to book, just turn up with cash).

There were maybe 20 or 30 of us, enough for a sense of event but too few to inhibit conversation, and we chatted with a few fellow Parkrunners, all excited and a bit incredulous at how good the weather was. The ferry noisily folded up the metal boarding deck and eased off onto the smooth sea, the view of the fishing boats framed by a backdrop of high green hills, reminding us of the famous fells of the Lake District.

Bere Island itself is a good size. A local chap told us it has 100 miles of roads, although its only about 6 miles by 2 miles. We’d looked to see if we could get the van onto the island, but it didn’t look feasible. A resident who’d volunteered at the start advised us otherwise, saying we would have been welcome in the van, and they’d find us somewhere to park up. My only qualm would be the ferry looked a bit dicey to get on and off, with maybe a bit of a bottoming-out risk.

It worked out really well on foot though. The ferry takes about 15 minutes, all with great views of Castletownbere and Bere Island. When we arrived on the island a mini bus pulled up which we all stared at, wondering how 30 of us would fit in. Not a problem, two more minibuses arrived, we all piled in and off we went in convoy along narrow roads with high hedges, riding high on the hills with views out to sea. The run doesn’t start until the bus(es) arrive, it’s a laid-back way of living around here.

The run was fun. I’d pulled on my daft-expensive running shoes and club vest, and let the legs fly as much as I could. I was quickly in the lead (this doesn’t happen often!), but had to stop at a junction when I didn’t spot the white arrows on the tarmac! Whoops, this does happen often, I’m useless at finding my way around.

The guy behind me wasn’t sure which way it was either, but then we saw the arrows and got going again. My fellow runner told me to get going, so I eased away. It turned out he and about 10 other guys were army reservists from Cork, and had been literally crawling up and down mountains on the island the day before. They’d had black pudding for breakfast too, which they seemed to be regretting at the finish! The video below shows the parkrun route, spectacular stuff, even at ground level.

The volunteers were great, asking what Julie’s name was so they could shout her in when she was in sight of the finish. A shout out back from us to John O’Sullivan, who was roped in to drive one of the minibuses and was on his 91st parkrun, an absolute character he was too, giving us all a laugh on the bus. The young lass who finished first among the ladies legged it back to the nearby village, and we later saw her running around serving us freshly-ground coffee and warm cake, post-parkrun staple treats!

We were lucky to get chatting with a couple from Northern Ireland, who were also in the motorhome parking alongside us, and are touring the south for a month. A really friendly couple, and fit too in their 60s, running, cycling and kayaking as they travel. They gave us tips for places to stay, and reinforced the increasingly strong feeling we have that Ireland is a fabulous country for motorhome travel.

Back at the van, we showered then made the most of the sun with a walk of about 3 miles each way to the ruins of the town’s Dunboy Castle. As seems a common theme down here, the pavements dissolved as soon as we were out of town, but there wasn’t much traffic and everyone slowed down on the country road, giving us a wide berth and we often exchanged ‘Irish Fingers’. Nope, not the bird drivers often angrily deploy in the UK! The Irish Finger is a forefinger slowly lifted in shared thanks.

The ruins occupy a wonderful spot by the sea, massively romantic with views to Bere and back across to the rest of the mainland. Jellyfish gently wallowed in the clear sea below us and large, strong fish powered past. A local lady paddling a kayak swapped pleasantries with us, and told us the seals popping up behind her were probably mums being protective of pups.

The castle itself was an O’Sullivan clan stronghold, back in the early 17th century when the English hadn’t yet fully broken the power of the Irish clan system. In rebellion with the English, the O’Sullivans found themselves facing a 5,000-strong army with only 143 defenders. The outcome was a ruined castle, and all the defenders killed. Either in battle or 58 of them were executed in the market square afterwards.

On the way to the castle ruins we passed under the sight of the once-grand Puxley Mansion. A one-time 6 star hotel, the financial crisis saw it abandoned, sadly surrounded by rusting building-site fencing. It too has an interesting history, having been burned down by the IRA in 1920 in reprisal for British forces destroying houses which had harboured IRA members.

It’s massively photogenic around here, really a beautiful, interesting and welcoming place to tour. I’ll leave you with a few more pics we (well, Ju, mine are rubbish) took while we were here. Tomorrow our 48 hours is up, so we’ll pootle off a little further. Rain’s forecast, so we probably won’t go too far, maybe around the peninsula to a camperstop with hook-up, where we can rejuice our batteries and the Jackery and empty our bin!

Cheers folks, Jay