Kenmare

Visited in April 2012, this site I found easily after getting chatting to a local...I parked on Henry St. in the town and walked up towards the town park, but staying to the left. At a red brick building ahead take a left and follow the lane up...you should be able to see a familiar brown sign pointing in the direction of the circle, which is to the right. When I got there, I discovered a sort of secluded oasis, fenced off from the surrounding outskirts of Kenmare by a ring of leilandai (is that how you spell it?) trees. To get to said oasis I had to walk past an unmanned garden shed, with a hatch which contained an honesty box asking for 2euros per visitor, and a sign saying ‘You are being filmed on CCTV’....a glance upwards proved this to be correct...there was the camera...so I gave it a grin and a wave as I popped a couple of quid in...and gained entrance to the circle. I just happened to have caught a lovely sunny break in typically Irish ‘4 seasons in 1 day’ weather as I arrived...and finding that there were no other visitors, spent a quiet hour watching a couple of blackbirds hop around the recently cut grass and trying to take satisfactory photos..(despite the ring of guardian leilandai being planted a metre or two too close to the stones in my opinion....I found it difficult to get a shot of the whole circle because I couldn’t get far away enough from it!!) Grumbles aside, I was pleasantly surprised at the atmosphere at this circle, in a place I had previously associated with rampant tourism and ‘Oirishness’...I’d reluctantly gone to Kenmare from Uragh, to find a bank at 4pm on a Friday afternoon...but found that this circle rewarded my unavoidable encounter with ‘civilisation’ in the end! Hurrah!