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Sustainable Ring of Kerry Rail Tour from Dublin
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From €161 per person
If you want to see the Ring of Kerry but don’t want to drive it yourself, this is a good shout. You take the train from Dublin Heuston Station down to Killarney, then spend the day circling the Ring by coach with a qualified driver-guide. The route covers some of the most dramatic coastal scenery in Ireland - Dingle Bay, Kenmare Bay, the MacGillycuddy Reeks - with stops along the way for morning tea, lunch and photos.
Carrantuohill, Ireland’s highest peak at 1,041 metres, is visible en route through the Reeks. The tour loops through the picturesque villages of Glenbeigh, Waterville and Sneem, then returns via Ladies View and the famous Lakes of Killarney through the national park’s oakwoods.
You’ll have reserved seats on the trains and a dedicated host travelling with you throughout.
The train departs Dublin Heuston at 7:00am, arriving into Killarney where you transfer onto the coach for the Ring of Kerry circuit.
The route circles the MacGillycuddy Reeks, passing through mountain passes and valleys along the shores of Dingle Bay and Kenmare Bay. Along the way there are stops for morning tea, lunch and photo opportunities in the villages of Glenbeigh, Waterville and Sneem.
The tour returns via Ladies View - a classic Kerry viewpoint - then through the Lakes of Killarney and the oakwoods of Killarney National Park before heading back to the station for the return train to Dublin.
Meeting point: Check in 20 minutes before departure. Look for the rep in a bright yellow jacket at the customer service desk in Heuston Station. Check in at 6:40am - the train departs at 7:00am and does not wait.
Glenbeigh is quick but Rossbeigh Strand is real. The coach stop here is brief, but if you get a few minutes on the spit, Rossbeigh Strand stretches seven kilometres out into Dingle Bay with Inch Beach visible across the water on the Dingle Peninsula. Even from the car park you get a sense of why this is one of the more dramatic beaches on the Wild Atlantic Way.
Waterville’s Chaplin statue is worth a photo, but so is the bay. The bronze Charlie Chaplin on the seafront is the famous stop - he came here every summer from 1959, staying at the Butler Arms Hotel on the promenade. The view from the seafront takes in both Lough Currane behind the village and Ballinskelligs Bay in front. It’s a genuinely unusual setting: a village on a narrow strip of land between a lake and the Atlantic.
Sneem has two squares and a river between them. The Sneem River cuts the village in half - North Square and South Square connected by a stone bridge. Keep an eye out for the bronze of Steve Crusher Casey in South Square - world heavyweight wrestling champion from 1938 to 1947, born in the parish. If you have time, the salmon cascades behind the church are five minutes on foot and almost never busy.
The return via Ladies View and Killarney National Park is genuinely worth watching. Killarney National Park was Ireland’s first national park - handed to the state in 1932 - and the oakwoods along the lakes are the real article. The park covers ten thousand hectares and contains Ireland’s only native red deer herd. If you’re back in Killarney with time before the train, the Knockreer walk along the lake edge is ten minutes from the station.