I Went on a Road Trip Through Southern Ireland to Discover My Heritage — Here’s What It Was Like

From sheep-lined cliffs to the ruins of once great clans, one writer unearths her family history on a trip to Ireland.

I grew up in Rome with an Italian father and a mother of Italian and Irish descent. Her father, my grandfather, is who I must thank for my Irish citizenship, my third among American and Italian. But despite being a citizen since the age of 12, I never felt particularly tied to the country, especially considering that my family’s Irish heritage has largely been silent.

All my family knew was that my grandfather was the son of a tough West Cork woman who traveled across the Atlantic to the United States in the early 20th century. There were no stories or photographs. Everyone before her was a ghost, as if the waves had swallowed our history during that long transatlantic journey.

A year ago, spurred by some sudden, inexplicable desire to understand the basis for my Irish citizenship, I began digging into my family history. I spent hours combing through Ancestry.com and scouring Ireland’s many public online databases for any information. After weeks of hunching over my laptop, I credibly traced my lineage as far back as the mid-19th century, unearthing names, birth, marriage, and death dates, occupations, and addresses, all tied to one place: County Cork. It only made sense to visit them.

Shortly after, my boyfriend and I booked a week-long trip to Ireland from our home in Boston. I drafted a road trip itinerary that would take us through five counties over 800 miles to hike along sheep-lined cliffs, stay in sleepy fishing villages, and visit the ruins of once great clans. I had visited Ireland twice before: once in high school, and another after graduating, but both trips were confined to Dublin. I wanted to see more of the country, so much more, and form some connection to the land that had housed generations of unknown family members.

We landed early in Dublin on Saint Patrick’s Day weekend to thick sheets of rain and crowds guzzling pints of Guinness as if they were water. We spent the day exploring the city in a jet lag-induced fog before returning to our airport hotel for an early night’s sleep. The following morning, we picked up our rental car at the airport and headed an hour south to our first stop: the Glendalough Monastic City, one of Ireland’s most important monastic sites.

Nestled in a clearing in the woods and flanked on one end by a lake, the area was founded in the 6th century, with surviving buildings dating from the 10th to the 12th centuries. From there, we continued further south into County Tipperary, with another stop at the imposing Rock of Cashel, a 1,000-year-old ecclesiastical complex teetering at the top of a limestone outcrop. Before heading back on the road, we stopped for a quick bite at the family-run cafe Granny’s Kitchen, where we dunked warm brown bread in freshly made vegetable soup and gorged on sausages wrapped in delicate puff pastry.

After hours of passing through small towns, we arrived in Cork City, the second-largest city in the Republic of Ireland. Our home for the night was the historic The Address Cork, a refurbished mid-19th-century hospital. Housed in a red brick Victorian building, the three-story, 70-room hotel in the landmark St. Luke’s Quarter on Military Hill boasts city views.

In a narrow alleyway across the River Lee, just a 30-minute walk from our hotel, I found where my great-great-grandfather Jeremiah, a basket weaver, lived during the first decade of the 20th century. Shadowed by the medieval Red Abbey Tower, the building appeared to be in good condition, and I could faintly hear someone’s television playing inside.

On the winding, cobblestoned Barrack Street, a 10-minute walk away, I found the two-story house where my great-great-great-grandparents Michael, a previously widowed laborer, and Catherine, a “spinster,” lived for some years. Surrounded by pubs, hipster coffee shops, and street art, the building appeared to be rotting from the inside out. Plants sprouted in the facade’s cracks, exposed wires ran along its edges, and its two-tone paint peeled like bark. Directly next to it was a construction pit, a sad but inevitable reminder that my ancestors’ house would likely follow suit.

Although the house was decrepit, it was still there. It was a tangible monument, an ancient relic of my ancestors’ existence, and for the first time in my life, the tenuous link I felt to the country snapped into place.

The following day, we continued south to Baltimore, a fishing village hanging off the southern tip of Ireland. This town is where my grandfather lived, off and on, for several years in a house he hoped to retire to before he suddenly passed away in 2006 when I was eight.

I never got to see the house he had loved so much, but I’ve heard stories of how it was surrounded by lush cherry and apple trees and wandering cows. The property was overlooked in the distance by the crumbling remains of a 19th-century cliffside signal tower overlooking Baltimore Harbour and Roaringwater Bay, known colloquially as the Spain Tower, where my grandparents would picnic on warmer days.

Upon arriving and checking into our family-run bed and breakfast, we headed slightly out of town and up a winding dirt road to hike to the tower. Unrelenting gusts of wind and rain, the kind Ireland is infamous for, forced us to reevaluate and head down to the village to visit the Baltimore Beacon instead.

Built in 1848, the 50-foot conical stone beacon is one of County Cork’s most iconic sites. It rises from a series of rugged cliffs that break from the land to reach into the ocean like fingers, where one strong gust of wind can carry you to sea — I don’t think the elements have so thoroughly lashed me as I was on that cold afternoon. After a warm shower, a fresh change of clothes, and a candle-lit bowl of steaming seafood chowder at the local haunt Casey’s, we turned in for an early night.

We pressed further south over the next few days and began looping around the country’s wild western peninsula. We ventured into County Kerry by taking the dizzyingly narrow and vertiginous Priest's Leap, a single-lane mountain pass that follows the twists and curves of the land for 33 miles. Freckled with grazing sheep and wandering cows, it’s dominated by views of towering mountains bisected by rushing rivers and gurgling streams painted in broad swaths of muted browns, yellows, and greens.

There were times while we were driving up it that I could lean out the window and see nothing but a vertical drop to the bottom. We visited the 1,000-feet-high Kerry Cliffs, slept in a cozy pub in the seaside village of Dingle, watched 3-month-old Border Collie puppies herd Blackface sheep in the mountains of County Galway, and visited beaches with crashing waves and sand so fine it felt like touching silk. We also hiked craggy coastlines like the steep 1.6-mile loop trail to Dunmore Head, a filming location for "Star Wars: The Last Jedi," that offered views so mind-bendingly immense that I forgot all about the sweat running down my back and the aches in my legs.

We feasted on lamb and steak, on sea bass and fish chowder. There was weather where it seemed like the very earth was trying to punish our existence, where we sought refuge in warm pubs for roast beef slathered in gravy and pints of local cider so delicious that I can only describe it as biting into a crisp red apple on a fall day. We were also lucky to have experienced days when the wind quieted, the clouds dissipated, and only undiluted sunshine made the hills and the ocean sparkle like the finest jewels. On those days, we joined the sheep lying in the grass to soak up the warm spring sun.

My family's history has been largely silent for a century, so tracing my heritage back nearly 200 years and visiting the houses that once held their lives was nothing short of a metaphysical experience. Now I know that a part of me hails from Cork City and is descended from basket weavers, servants, and laborers. I also know that three generations of my female ancestors tended to wed later in life for the era, in their mid-20s, and were referred to as spinsters on public records. It’s more information than I could have hoped for, and I can’t help but feel a new sense of kinship with the country — I’m already planning a second, more extended road trip for the spring of 2025.

I don’t pretend to be Irish simply because I have citizenship. I know it takes much more than a passport and some old documents to lay claim to land. However, I acknowledge that Ireland is a link in my family chain, one that I’m unexpectedly immensely proud of. How lucky I am to be tied to a country where sheep pepper the land like snow, where shades of green blanket every dip in the land, and where the ocean churns and rages against cliffs in a millennia-old dance of ebb and flow.

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