West Cork Coastline Safari
Cycling Itinerary
Starting from Cork (Ireland's real capital, according to its inhabitants!), the tour brings you through a world of small farms, wild flowers, old world gentleness, warm hospitality, busy harbour villages, and market towns.
County Cork is situated in the South West of Ireland, it is the largest of all the Irish counties and in many ways the most varied. Rich farmlands and river valleys contrast with the wild sandstone hills of the west, and above all there is the magnificent coastline scooped and fretted by the Atlantic into great bays and secret coves, strewn with rocky headlands and long soft golden sands.
Cork, or Corcaigh or 'The Great Marsh of Munster' had its historic beginning in the 7th century when St. Finbarr founded his monastic settlement on what is now Gillabbey Rock. The physical shape of Cork derives from its island beginnings. Water and tides, birds and boys fishing, bridges and Amsterdam-like house-fronts, all cajole the walker and casual visitor to the city. Up to the 1770s Cork was a city of waterways. Patrick Street was seriously damaged in the dying days of the War of Independence but much of the remaining fabric of the city remains as it was in the 19th Century. Cork has many physical qualities, steps, steeples and hidden squares and lanes. Over the years the medieval plot size and street pattern have been retained, despite much of the city being rebuilt in the 18th and 19th Centuries.
Day 3 - Gougane Barra to Ahakista
Day 6 - Baltimore to Clonakilty