Dunhill
Dún Aill

A ruined Norman castle on a rock, a community ecopark, and one good pub at the bottom of the hill.

Dunhill is the kind of village you would drive through in two minutes if you weren't told to stop. A church, a primary school, a parish hall, one pub at the crossroads, and on a rock above all of it the broken silhouette of a Norman castle. That castle is the reason for the village — fort of the cliff is what the Irish name means, and the village grew up at its feet for the simple medieval reason that you put your houses where the lord could see trouble coming.

The Power family — La Poer, before the centuries softened the spelling — held the place from around 1200 until Cromwell's army arrived at the end of 1649. The story of the siege is the one local people tell: Countess Giles holding the keep with a single brilliant gunner, Cromwell's men pushed back from the walls, and then the gunner finding out the household was reduced to buttermilk and surrendering on the spot in disgust. The Cromwellians came in and killed everyone inside. The walls have been a ruin since. Standing on the rock now with the wind off the Comeraghs, it is not hard to picture.

The other reason to stop is the Anne Valley Walk — a flat gravel path that follows the little River Anne from the village down to Annestown cove on the coast. Local people built and maintain it; it shows in the upkeep. Add the Dunhill Ecopark up the road, where the community has built a training centre and rented small units to thirty-odd makers and food producers, and you have a village that has done more with itself in the last twenty years than most places its size manage in a century. Stop at the castle, walk a stretch of the valley, get a meal at Harney's. That's the morning.