Every August, Killorglin crowns a goat. This is not a joke or a metaphor: a wild mountain goat is caught, brought into the town, and set on a high platform in the square as King Puck, to reign for three days over Puck Fair, one of the oldest and strangest festivals in Ireland. Nobody quite knows how it began, and the tradition is said to go back some four hundred years or more. Horse trading, music, street stalls and a great deal of drinking go on around the clock, and at the end the goat is freed and returned to the hills. It is peculiar, joyful and entirely sincere.
The rest of the year, Killorglin is a quiet market town on the River Laune, about twenty kilometres east of Tralee, at the foot of a hill and at the start of the Ring of Kerry. A bridge crosses the river, and the main street runs steeply up the slope, with colourful shopfronts and pubs. The statue of the goat stands at the entrance to the town. Beyond the river rise the peaks of Macgillycuddy's Reeks, with Carrauntoohil, Ireland's highest mountain at 1,038 metres, among them.
The Ring of Kerry, the 179-kilometre circuit of the Iveragh Peninsula on the N70, is one of the most popular tourist routes in Ireland, and the traffic runs one way in practice. Tour buses travel the loop anticlockwise, so many riders go clockwise to avoid sitting behind them, which means meeting the coaches head-on on narrow bends, and patience is needed. Mornings and evenings are best. The road surface is mostly good, with fast, flowing sections along the coast and slower stretches through villages. Weather changes quickly: sun, rain and rainbows in an hour are common. May, June and September are the best months.
The Laune valley and the nearby Dingle Bay are rich in wildlife, with salmon in the river, seals and dolphins in the bay, and migratory birds on the sand flats. The air carries the smell of turf smoke and wet grass.
Killorglin has fuel stations, supermarkets, cafés and pubs, and it is the sensible place to fill the tank before the Ring. Tralee, about nineteen kilometres away, is the nearest big town. A coffee and a scone, or a pint of stout in one of the old pubs, is the right way to start or end the day.