A rugged holiday on Ireland's spectacularly wild Iveragh Peninsula

There is an old Irish expression that goes, ‘There’s a lot of weather in a March day,’ but it could apply to any day of the year on the Iveragh Peninsula. Standing on the glorious three-mile sweep of Rossbeigh Beach, a long tendril of sand that curls into the centre of Dingle Bay, you can see it coming – and there is nowhere better from which to watch the clouds roll in from the Atlantic Ocean. Suddenly, the panorama of the neighbouring Dingle Peninsula is completely obscured; moments later, there it is, bathed in bright sunshine again. The weather looms large here, the skies are vast, and the ever-changing light adds to the elemental drama of the landscape.

One of the five fingers of land poking into the Atlantic Ocean in the south-west of the country, the Iveragh Peninsula is one of Ireland’s most scenic swathes of countryside, and a magnificent collision of mountain and ocean. Tracing a path between Killorglin and Kenmare, much of the celebrated Ring of Kerry follows the rugged 60-mile ribbon of road around the peninsula’s edge. Tour buses starting from nearby tourist hotspot Killarney might do it as a round trip in a day, but it deserves to be taken slowly.

From Killorglin, the N70 (a prosaic name, given its glorious route) threads its way through bog and coast in the heather-flecked shadow of the rumpled 400-million-year-old MacGillycuddy’s Reeks. These are the mountains that form the peninsula’s central spine. Beyond Rossbeigh, as you drive south along the Wild Atlantic Way, the Dingle Peninsula unfurls beside you in wide-angle splendour. Detour to Kells Bay House & Gardens, a gem hidden in a kink of coastline, kissed by the warm currents of the Gulf Stream that create an unusual microclimate. The 19th-century estate, where the subtropical gardens are open to visitors, reveals an extraordinary primeval forest of hundreds of tree ferns – the largest collection in northern Europe. Shady and silent, the canopy of fronds forms a lacy green ceiling above your head, creating the feeling you have accidentally wandered into a Tolkienesque scene.

Beyond Caherciveen, one place the tour buses often miss is Valentia Island. One of Ireland’s most westerly points, it played a historic role in the evolution of global communications. The world’s longest transatlantic telegraph cable was laid to the island from Heart’s Content, Newfoundland, in 1866 – the first permanent communications link between Europe and North America. The island’s main village, Knightstown, reached by a five-minute ferry ride from Reenard Point on the mainland, has a prim, old-world charm at odds with the rugged nature around it. On the north-east of the island is some of the oldest evidence of amphibians’ first steps on land – 385-million-year-old crocodile-like tetrapod tracks preserved in the rocks.