Bracing place to enjoy the fresh salt air and seaweed

THE plug might have been pulled on one of Ballybunion’s famed seaweed bath businesses, but there’s still a chance to take a bracing plunge by the water’s edge and the Ladies’ Strand.

While the town’s long tradition of health-inducing, iodine-immersion and seaweed wraps continues with the Collins family’s Ballybunion bath business, another of the experienced practitioners, the Dalys, finished up in the early 2000s. Seaweed baths and wraps are known for their therapeutic and de-stressing properties, and feature widely in luxury hotel spas — but in Ballybunion the experience is wholly authentic, with wrack and weed harvested daily from the Black Rocks.

Now, the former site of Dalys’ baths is to be developed for a small and pretty select number of holiday apartments and duplexes — seven units only.