The ultimate road trip
PEOPLE get kudos for walking, cycling or running the length of Ireland, from toe to top, from Mizen Head in West Cork to Malin Head in Donegal’s Inishowen Peninsula, or vice versa, top to toe. Heck, they should even get credit for driving it. These dramatic headlands are poles apart, a country apart: in Irish terms, it’s sort of our own version of Land’s End to John o’Groats. Only more ruggedly beautiful.
Whoever said we inhabit a small, rugged island off western Europe wasn’t behind the wheel of a car, or the saddle of a bike, travelling from Cork to Donegal, the start-end counties of the ingenious Wild Atlantic Way which has soundly gotten into its stride this summer, luring visitors to the country’s dramatic western craggy and cliff strewn coastlines, away from the east coast Dublin magnet. Not only are these book-ending WAW counties far-distant from one another, their headland extremities Malin and Mizen are each practically a two-hour drive from their own county borders — but each are so well worth the extra bit of travel to the outer extremities.
