Dingle, part the second, and Cahersiveen.

The next morning I woke up a bit early in order to attempt to make the walk out to the oratory. I was accompanied by an American woman from the hostel who also wanted to see it, and a photocopy of a map given to me by a nice woman at the visitor centre. The walk was to be about eight kilometres each way on small country roads. There aren't walkways of any kind, but the Irish don't mind driving in the middle of the road for a bit in order to give you room. We'd only gotten about midway when we realised that we'd certainly made a wrong turn very early on in the journey. Irish roads are famously unmarked. Irish maps don't mention all of the roads, but only the main ones, or the ones the mapmaker thought you might need. We could have backtracked, but I was done. The walk in the country had been nice enough, and I wanted to get out of Dingle. I was on the next bus.

There was one other good thing about the place, but it wasn't at all Dingle's doing: on the page of my guidebook that dealt with the Gallarus Oratory, brief mention was also made of a couple of medieval stone forts in a somewhat nearby town called Cahersiveen on the next peninsula down. It seemed like a good enough idea, so I took a complicated series of buses in order to explore.

The stone forts were wonderful, though, and Cahersiveen was precisely what I'd needed after a tourist town. It was tiny and obscure, small enough to have one hostel in which the proprietor seemed a little surprised to have a modest pile of guests. The long walk to the sites, which I was pleased to take alone, only involved two roads, taking me on a bridge over a river, down a long, even more lovely country road, and past a castle. I might argue that my feelings about castles have less to do with my being a tourist and more with my being a big nerd, but the result either way is a rather huge collection of photographs with the things hanging about somewhere in the background.

The first site I visited was Cahergall, a massive ring of corbelled stones with a smaller ring at the centre. The inside of the larger circle was built in a series of steps that one could climb to get to the top, but that also made a convincing set of thrones if one were, for example, to use the place to strut about quoting Shakespeare, or the film Labyrinth, frequently pausing to sulkily collapse into appropriately royal stone seats. I believe I mentioned being a big nerd already, yes?

The second, Leacanabuile, was the older of the two, and certainly the simpler, but in its comparative disorder it had its own appeal. It was comprised of three separate old dwellings and two other structures, the owners leaving the older one where it was when they built and moved into the new one. The first was a traditional round hut, and the second and third square. One of them had an opening in the ground that led to a subterranean tunnel, unfortunately too narrow to allow for a bit of ill-advised solitary spelunking on my part. The true charm of this fort lie in the fact that its stone walls were all lower than eye-level with verdant grasses growing on the tops. I dream about such mazes. My favourite pictures of the place are the ones that obscure the true shape a bit, emphasising that labyrinthine quality. It helped that Leacanabuile is located in the middle of a pasture for sheep. They scattered at my approach, but when I first arrived a couple of the rams were grazing atop the walls of the fort, looking exceptionally noble and fey. On the bus out of the place I passed a town that boasted of being the location of Ireland's oldest folk festival. They celebrate Puck a bit later in August, apparently parading some lucky goat around the town, a crown perched on his horns.

Neither site was so sublime as the ritual grounds I've been chasing, but they were both truly delightful places. I might fall into states of childlike wonder more easily than most responsible adults, but not usually with such abandon. I wished rather intently that my young niece, who identifies as a pirate, a princess, and several other very important things besides, could play there.

The next morning was Lughnasadh. I took another walk in the country, eating some of the ripe wild blackberries I found on the road to celebrate.