Peig sayers dingle drivers#

When we finally swept into town (the donkey having ultimately yielded the road), we were astonished to find our passage eased by a new one-way system - mundane but effective. The peninsula has always been a popular vacation destination for the Irish, and in summer the roads to the west of town are thronged with young people who travel to this outpost of gaeltact (or Irish-speaking)culture to learn their native language. Dingle's natural beauty, its status as frontier town and cultural center, and its ability to cater comfortably to visitors while remaining its own curious, stubborn self have made the area a magnet for tourism.

Peig sayers dingle drivers#

Some of our most nostalgic memories of living there, in fact, were of being awakened early by the daily clattering of horses, pulling their loads of milk and cream to the creamery, or of flocks of sheep being driven along the main street while cars and their irritated drivers sat marooned amid those bobbing woolly bodies.Īctually, livestock are only one aspect of the area's traffic problems. He and I lived in the town of Dingle, in southwestern Ireland's County Kerry, for eight months in the mid-1980's, and we knew that on roads all over the peninsula confrontations between the four-legged and the four-wheeled were rarely settled to the advantage of the latter. My husband, Paul, shrugged: 'Dingle traffic jam.' The farmer who walked beside it nodded amiably to us but seemed disinclined to make the animal move any faster.

WE were driving along the narrow road that hugs the southern coast of the Dingle Peninsula when we found ourselves slowed to a crawl by a donkey that was ambling in front of us, pulling a rough cart.