The land was bought in 1973 by Peter and Harriet Cornish, an English couple looking for somewhere remote to live a contemplative life. They built up the buildings slowly over the next two decades, working with what the headland offered: stone, weather, view. In 1992, they offered the place to a charitable trust under the spiritual guidance of Sogyal Rinpoche, the Tibetan teacher behind the international Rigpa organisation. Harriet died in 1993. The care she received in her last illness, and the way she met her death, became the seed of what would later grow into the Spiritual Care Centre. Peter went on living at Dzogchen Beara for two more decades. He wrote his memoir, Dazzled by Daylight, in 2014 - the title borrowed from his sense, near the end of his own life, of light still arriving.

The first closed one-year retreat began in 1994. The schedule follows the traditional Tibetan pattern of practice and study, with long hours of meditation, periods of teaching, and the silence that holds them together. Over the decades, Dzogchen Beara has hosted senior lamas including Dzogchen Rinpoche, Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche, Garchen Rinpoche, Orgyen Tobgyal, Ringu Tulku, Jetsun Khandro Rinpoche, and Garje Khamtrul Rinpoche - names known across the Tibetan Buddhist world that few residents of West Cork would have heard of fifty years ago. Lay teachers from the broader contemplative scene also pass through: Sister Stanislaus Kennedy, the psychologist Dr Tony Bates, Sharon Salzberg of Insight Meditation in the United States, Patrick Gaffney, and Christine Longaker. In 2006, in a small but pointed gesture, Dzogchen Beara became the first Buddhist centre in Ireland to host a Christian Mass - celebrated by Father Laurence Freeman of the World Community for Christian Meditation.

The Spiritual Care Centre opened in 2007, formally inaugurated by Mary McAleese, then President of Ireland, on 12 September. Its purpose, in the words of one of its early directors, is to support people leading up to death, at the time of death, and after death. It grew directly out of what Harriet Cornish's family and community learned by accompanying her to the end. The Tibetan lama Orgyen Tobgyal consecrated the temple site in a fire ceremony in 2010, and ground was broken on the temple's foundations in April 2016. The completed three-storey structure is the first dedicated Tibetan Buddhist temple in Ireland - an unlikely sight on a Cork headland, and at the same time entirely at home there. The Beara coast has always drawn people who came to be at the edge of something.

In 2017, Sogyal Rinpoche retired from his position as spiritual director of Rigpa following allegations from current and former students of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse over a period of decades. The allegations, made public in an open letter, were credible and serious; the organisation he had built had to reckon with them. Dzogchen Beara has continued operating under new spiritual leadership in the years since, holding retreats, running the care centre, and welcoming visitors. The reckoning is not complete and may never be. For the people who walk up the road from Allihies to sit on the cliff and watch the Atlantic, the practice remains what it always was - difficult, useful, and not separable from the human beings who teach it.

On a clear day, the view from the meditation hall takes in Bantry Bay to the south, the long blue shape of Whiddy Island, and the open sea past the Mizen and the Fastnet Rock. Westerly weather rolls in off the Atlantic - sometimes mist, sometimes the sharp clean light that follows a storm front through. The cliff edge is close. The buildings are simple. The only thing that announces this as a Tibetan place rather than a Cork place is the prayer flags strung between posts, lifting and falling in a wind that has been doing what it does for as long as the Beara Peninsula has been pointed at the ocean.