Qualla: Eyeries

Eyeries: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ingo Mehling, CC BY-SA 3.0. The houses are pink and yellow and tangerine and turquoise, the kind of colours you might paint a child's drawing if you had only the most cheerful crayons in the box. Eyeries sits on a bluff above Coulagh Bay on the Beara Peninsula, one of the most south-westerly villages in Ireland, and it does not apologise for being beautiful. In 2012 the all-island Best-Kept Places competition named it overall winner. The Tidy Towns judges have come back year after year with awards. The verdict, when you walk up the single curving street, is hard to dispute.

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Image: Ingo Mehling | CC BY-SA 3.0

Eyeries: Where Cork Becomes the Atlantic

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nigel Cox, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Beara Peninsula is the middle finger of three peninsulas that point south-west from Ireland into the ocean - the Iveragh to its north across Kenmare Bay, the Mizen Head to its south. Eyeries lies roughly halfway along Beara's north coast, looking across Coulagh Bay toward the...

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Image: Nigel Cox | CC BY-SA 2.0

Eyeries: The Cheese That Started a Country

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gerd Eichmann, CC BY-SA 4.0. Just outside Eyeries, on a small farm at Milleens, Veronica Steele made the first wheel of modern Irish artisan cheese in the late 1970s. Until then, Ireland's dairies produced cheddar for the supermarkets and not much else. Steele - reportedly using a few gallons of her own cow'...

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Image: Gerd Eichmann | CC BY-SA 4.0

Eyeries: Stones and Stories

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nigel Cox, CC BY-SA 2.0. Two kilometres south-west of the village stands the Coulagh Stone Circle, ruined now but recognisable. To the north-east at Ardgroom are two more stone circles, one of them in fine condition. These rings of standing stones date from the Bronze Age, when the Beara Peninsula was ap...

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Image: Nigel Cox | CC BY-SA 2.0

Eyeries: A Refuge for Writers

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mick Garratt, CC BY-SA 2.0. Past the village, opposite the graveyard at Cappaneil, is the Anam Cara Writer's and Artist's Retreat. Since around 2000 it has hosted hundreds of writers and artists - novelists, poets, painters, screenwriters - who book a room for a week or a month and use the silence to finish...

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Image: Mick Garratt | CC BY-SA 2.0

Eyeries: What the Colours Say

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mike Searle, CC BY-SA 2.0. The painted houses are not whimsy. In coastal Ireland the tradition runs deep: lime wash with pigment in it, refreshed each year, partly to keep the salt at bay and partly to give the village an identity visible from the sea. Eyeries leans into the tradition harder than most. The...

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Image: Mike Searle | CC BY-SA 2.0