Baile na nGall · Co. Kerry
A Gaeltacht pier looking straight across the bay at a 1580 massacre.
Baile na nGall means "the village of the foreigners." The story is that foreign sailors landed here often enough - Norse, Spanish, French, who knows by now - that the village got named after them rather than for any Irish family. It is a small, sea-facing huddle of houses on the north shore of the Dingle peninsula, on Smerwick Harbour, fifteen minutes' drive from Dingle town and a long way from anywhere else.
Two things make Ballydavid more than a wide spot in the road. The first is that it is a working Gaeltacht - a real one, where the language is the everyday language of the bar and the shop and the football pitch. The second is the view. Stand on the pier and look across the bay. That low headland on the far side is Dún an Óir, the Iron Age fort where in November 1580 the English crown executed six hundred surrendered Italian and Spanish mercenaries and the Irish women and children with them. Walter Raleigh swung a sword that day. Edmund Spenser, the poet, watched and wrote it up. The water in front of you remembers.
Don't come for entertainment. Come for one good evening in Tig Bhric with a pint of the West Kerry beer brewed in the shed out the back, a session if there's one going, and a walk on Smerwick Strand the next morning before anybody else has thought to. Two kilometres up the road sits Gallarus Oratory - the most perfect dry-stone church in Europe, still standing watertight after a thousand-odd years. Most days you'll have it to yourself.
