County Cork, Ireland 🇮🇪 2019 – Michael and Pam's Travels

Date: 12th June 2019

Travelled: 137 kilometres from Cashel, County Tipperary to Molly’s Beach, County Cork

Visited: Hore Abbey and Kinsale

Stayed: Molly’s Beach car-park, free with T+W+B. N51.64459, W08.58291

Budget: 10 days @ €93 per day

The Rock of Cashel car-park ends up being a quiet place for the night and inexpensive as well. The electric boom gates go up at 1800 hours and stay up until 0800 hours. So we roll out the gate at 0730 and save €4.50 as did our German neighbours. We park just around the corner, were the parking is free to 0930.

The are several posts on the Motorhome Ireland Facebook page referring to Hore Abbey, also at Cashel. So after coffee and fruit we wander for a look see. It’s another cool overcast morning, so its jacket, gloves and beanie job.

Found this carved stone near the high alter, Latin was not an elective at Richmond High School.

So Cashel is done. As we roll out of town finding a new Lidl supermarket and do a little stock up. We love the croissants and danish from Lidl. You cannot by beer and wine until 1030 in Ireland so that will need to wait until another day. We continue south into County Cork. It’s a freeway, which somehow turned into a tollway (€1.90) without us knowing. The rolling green hills and pasture pass by in light drizzle, just enough to flick the wipers every couple of minutes. We bypass Cork as we spent a day there years ago, did the Blarney Castle thing and don’t feel the need to deal with a city. So we continue on to Kinsale.

Kinsale is the starting point (or finishing point) of the Wild Atlantic Way, Ireland’s west coast tourist route. Whilst we don’t plan much as a rule, we intend to follow it as best we can for the next few weeks.

The blue link above will take you to the website or you can click and zoom in on this.

Kinsale is a pretty little port village on the River Bandon. About 15 klm south of Cork. It has narrow streets, limited parking, there are tourist buses double parked everywhere. My least favourite place so far this trip.

Finally a little piece of quiet. the old marina at Kinsale.

We did find a nice near empty car-park just past the Fire Station and walk back into the village. We had thoughts of a pub lunch today, but the need to drive back through that chaos (after a beer and wine) put us off. So we wandered the shops and market for 40 minutes before returning to the Hymer. We make our way out of Kinsale and start our tour of the Wild Atlantic Way (which I will refer to as the WAW from this point).

Our first point of interest on the WAW is the Old Head of Kinsale, so we take the turn.

The cliffs around the Old Head of Kinsale are well worth the drive.

Mind you we drive all the way out here to find the Old Head of Kinsale is now a private golf course and no entry is available !

Mind you, there is a very interesting memorial to the sinking of the Lusitania out here.

A couple of klms back on the R604 we find a nice place to park up on Molly’s Beach. We are soon joined by a couple of French camper-cars, so we have some company tonight.

Michael and Pam

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