Wild Camping in Ireland…
is not a thing. There is squatting, and trespassing and biker gang camps behind the pub, but the thing we call dispersed camping in the US and what the Irish call wild camping does not exist. Every scrap of land is either farm land (i.e., covered in a thick patina of dookie), afforested land (i.e., tree farm that is trenched every 2 meters to make drainage suitable for trees), bog (i.e., standing water) or mountain top (which is also, amazingly, bog - see blanket bog). To make it harder, there is also the Country Code, which states that you shall not camp in a field, nor within 400 m of a road capable of carrying a vehicle, nor within 30 m of a waterway. Spoiler, I don't know where this mythical configuration of requirements is, but we didn't find it.
When we decided to hike the Kerry Way, I expected that the logistics would be similar to our long hikes in the States - at least a semblance. When we have a trail that is 100+ miles in the US, there are places to camp - could be official car or backcountry campgrounds or dispersed camping. And while it might be hard to get permits, the camps are present. Evidently this method of hiking is not compatible with the Irish weather, has more sinister roots (Em proposed that prejudice against the Irish Travelers is the root cause for the paucity of campgrounds) or something else entirely.
In any event, my false assumptions were further advanced when I talked with the staff in the local gear shops. Again I'll quote exactly the response to my question about the feasibility of wild camping: "Oooh, yeah. You'll have no trouble atall. People've been doing that for years." Good. Off we go then.
If you've been curious about this Kerry Way we keep talking about and have "searched it up", as the kids say these days, you may have learned that there are 9 stages, ranging from about 10 to 20 miles in length and the first of these ends in a place called Black Valley. While the Black Valley is truly beautiful, it's a farm surrounded by rocky hills. So when we arrived after a 14 mile day (both the kids personal best BTW!), it was not so great to walk the road for several miles with profoundly uninviting, barbed wire fence on each side. Eventually, the owner of the (closed) Black Valley Hostel popped out and said we could camp in the woods down by the lakes. She was right that there was a use site there, and we found the finest campsite of the entire hike on the edge of the afforested area, just by the river. It was someone's tree farm. It was well within 400 meters of the road. It was well within 30 m of the river.
We managed to camp only five out of the 10 days we were on the Way. The next time was in the field behind the Climbers Inn in Glencar with a motorcycle gang (not kidding) where we watched Mayo loose the All Ireland Football Championship (because of the curse of course). Next, we found a spot in what we decided was for sure a fairy forest outside Mastergeehy (I’m told you can just feel it). Fortunately, the fairies didn't murder us in our sleep. Then I called what seemed like a campground in Sneem, but in actuality only allowed motorhomes because they don't have toilets - the owner generously let us stay in the grass behind the guesthouse (err, but toilets…). Finally, we found what was a potentially legal site in the forest near Blackwater Bridge. Each was surely eventful.
My overriding experience of this was worry about finding a legal and Country Code Compliant (CCC) site for my family between the long stages. Because the kids can't walk a 20 mile leg (and I don’t like to), we really didn't have a choice for many of these days. However, as I mulled over this problem on the trail, it drove home the intense human impact on the (built and natural) environment in Europe. I feel this often when visiting but I think it usually comes off as a vague sense of careful manicuring. So much seems well built or well cared for - a nice stone wall, cobblestone alleys or fields divided for purpose by the suitableness of the growth product. Surely, a lot of this sense is selection bias (because, of course, a careful inspection reveals a lot that isn't well constructed), but I think most of this is simply the time that people have had to consider organizing the land and space - centuries in Europe, decades in Sunnyvale. Nowhere is this more evident than on the trail, where even a 20 mile off-trail hike in the Western US can place you where no one else has walked in perhaps 100 years (as evidenced by finding arrowheads on the surface). Not so in Ireland, where I made my family into a bunch of squatters.
