Cathair Samháin to
Cathair Dónall.

The two cahers

Neither fort is on the recorded track. They are here because the walk runs from one to the other, and because both gave their names to the townlands it starts and ends in. Neither distance below establishes an approach or permission to cross the ground.

Cathair Samháin stands about 360 metres off the early part of the walk: a circular caher roughly 23 metres across inside, faced with stone on both sides of a rubble wall, with three internal terraces and a ditch and outer bank around part of it. Cathair Dónall stands about 800 metres off the finish above Derrynane Bay, and is the larger at 25 metres across, its outer wall still five metres high at the north with a five-metre entrance passage at the south-west. It has been rebuilt more than once, and Windele noted in 1848 that it was being used as a pound.

Tobar na Bearnan

Just below Windy Gap, 38 metres off the recorded line, is a spring the Survey records as Tobar na Bearnan. It was the final station of the Kilcrohane turas, a pilgrimage formerly held in late July and early August, and its water was reputed to cure conditions of the eye.

The well sits on the south-east side of a low cairn of slabs and quartz. Beside it is a slab 40 centimetres by 20, cut with a cross that has a smaller cross in each of its angles, and lying beside that an elongated stone point, used for making the sign of the cross on the slab. Whether the point is still there this page cannot tell you. The pass is the reason the walk goes this way and the reason the turas ended here: everything crossing this ground crossed it in the same place.

Windy Gap and the planets

This is the inland branch of the Kerry Way. From the Glanbeg side, lanes lead around the eastern end of Lough Currane before the trail climbs to the pass below Eagles Hill. Beyond the gap, the view opens towards the sea and the line descends to Coad.

The final approach follows the old Butter Road towards Caherdaniel. Here the Walk of the Planets places the solar system along the trail at scale. The supplied photographs catch Uranus and Jupiter among the grass and rock, with blue water beyond the hillside.

A shelter and a marked rock

Two more things sit close to the descent. At Coad, 92 metres off the line, is a rock shelter roofed by a single boulder of about twenty square metres, with a low walled section open to the south-east and a second chamber behind it reached by a crawl space. Periwinkle and limpet shells lie in the recesses of both, and the Survey associates them with the family who lived here after the Famine. Incised carvings of the kind Shee Twohig calls COMBS style are cut on a boulder at the back.

At Ballycarnahan, 119 metres off the line in rough pasture above the trail, an earthfast sandstone boulder three metres long carries at least ten cup-marks and one cup-and-ring motif, with possibly more under the gorse. It was identified by Joyce Tansey and recorded by Aoibheann Lambe for the LIVE project. Both are off the track, on ground the same caution applies to.

The Derrynane ogham stone

About 1.7 kilometres beyond the finish, and a separate visit rather than part of this walk, is the ogham stone at Doire Fhíonáin Beag. It lay partly buried on Derrynane strand until the OPW raised it where it now stands in the 1940s. It is 2.1 metres of sandstone grit, National Monument 346, and its inscription is badly weathered: several letters Macalister read in 1945 could no longer be seen by the later survey. Check the current approach locally.