I go out often in the mornings to the site of Sybil Ferriter’s Castle, on a little headland reached by a narrow strip of rocks.  As I lie there I can watch whole flights of cormorants and choughs and seagulls that fly about under the cliffs, and beyond them a number of niavogues that are nearly always fishing in Ferriter’s Cove.  Further on there are Sybil Head and three rocky points, the Three Sisters then Smerwick Harbour and Brandon far away, usually covered with white airy clouds.  Between these headlands and the village there is a strip of sandhill grown over with sea-holly, and a low beach where scores of red bullocks lie close to the sea, or wade in above their knees.  Further on one passes peculiar horseshoe coves, with contorted lines of sandstone on one side and slaty blue rocks on the other, and necks of transparent sea of wonderful blueness between them.

I walked up this morning along the slope from the east to the top of Sybil Head, where one comes out suddenly on the brow of a cliff with a straight fall of many hundred feet into the sea.  It is a place of indescribable grandeur, where one can see Carrantuohill and the Skelligs and Loop Head and the full sweep of the Atlantic, and, over all, the wonderfully tender and searching light that is seen only in Kerry.  Looking down the drop of five or six hundred feet, the height is so great that the gannets flying close over the sea look like white butterflies, and the choughs like flies fluttering behind them.  One wonders in these places why anyone is left in Dublin, or London, or Paris, when it would be better, one would think, to live in a tent or hut with this magnificent sea and sky, and to breathe this wonderful air, which is like wine in one’s teeth.

Here and there on this headland there are little villages of ten or twenty houses, closely packed together without any order or roadway.  Usually there are one or two curious beehive-like structures in these villages, used here, it is said, as pigsties or storehouses.  On my way down from Sybil Head I was joined by a tall young man, who told me he had been in the navy, but had bought himself out before his time was over.  ‘Twelve of us joined from this place,’ he said, ’and I was the last of them that stayed in it, for it is a life that no one could put up with.  It’s not the work that would trouble you, but it’s that they can’t leave you alone, and that you must be ever and always fooling over something.’

He had been in South Africa during the war, and in Japan, and all over the world; but he was now dressed in homespuns, and had settled down here, he told me, for the rest of his life.  Before we reached the village we met Maurice, the fisherman I have spoken of and we sat down under a hedge to shelter from a shower.  We began to talk of fevers and sicknesses and doctors—­these little villages are often infested with typhus—­and Maurice spoke about the traditional cures.