Go walk: An Blascaod Mór, Co Kerry

To walk the high airy ridge of An Blascaod Mór on a clear day is to experience one of Ireland’s little known but great walks. Your immediate companions will be the wind, sheep, seagulls and an inevitably heaving sea and, on your horizon, the high mountains of the Brandon range and the Iveragh peninsula.

As you go west to An Ceann Dubh at the end of the island, the storied islands of Inis Tuaisceart, An Tiaracht, Inis na Bro and Inis Mhic Aoibhleáin will hold your gaze, along with the mystical Skelligs away to the southwest. This island is a gift to us of ancient geology – smothered, smoothened and scratched by ice for millenniums and battered and worn since then by countless Atlantic storms.

I visited on a sunny April day, an anticyclone over Scotland giving us successive days of cloudless skies and almost summer warmth – not the weather that had shaped our wild Atlantic coast or the psyches of those for whom An Blascaod Mór was home.

On this day, the sun warmed and dried the fenceless sheep-cropped fields and rough pastures and green tracks and paths, over which I walked easily to the end of the island. It brought out the vivid colours of sea and sand and distant mountains, still clothed in their winter raiment of light yellows and greys, and it encouraged over 500 seals to haul out and bask on the perfect white sand of An Traigh Bhán.

If you do go to walk this island, bring your imagination as well as your camera and boots. At the end of the day, your imagination is your best guide, and nowhere is this more true than on this beautiful austere island.

Because our imagination sometimes needs a little help, start your walk inside the visitor centre at Dún Chaoin and then walk 1km along the Dingle Way from the centre to your ferry at the tiny picturesque pier, savouring your shapely island destination on your right as you go.

To wander the centre is the most moving of experiences, a respectful preparation for your introduction to the island and, most importantly, to the lives of its people.

You will meet them through their words and stories and imaginations and their smiles and their laughter and their music. You will see how their world was saved for all of us, on the brink of oblivion, by farsighted and deeply respectful foreign and Irish scholars who saw something beautiful and rich and fragile and passing in those people and their language, traditions and stories.

Bring all of this with you in your mind’s eye and the stones and the fields will not be just empty or windblown or sad but will tell you eloquent stories of lives lived with vitality and exuberance and fun as well as real hardship. And your walk will not be just a wonderful walk, but a deeply enriching experience.