Inch Strand is a sand spit, in the strict geographer's sense: a long narrow tongue of sand and dune deposited by tidal currents and wind, attached to land at one end and trailing out into open water at the other. It reaches roughly five kilometres into Dingle Bay from the Dingle Peninsula's southern shore, almost meeting the opposite spit at Rossbeigh on the Iveragh side. Together those two spits nearly close off Castlemaine Harbour from the open sea, leaving only a narrow channel through which the tides race. The whole system — strand, dunes, and the harbour behind them — is designated a Special Area of Conservation at Castlemaine Harbour, protecting habitats that include rare plants in the dune slacks and the wading birds that feed in the shallows. At low tide the strand widens enormously, and a car can drive out onto it for what feels like a small inland sea of pale sand. At high tide the dunes hold the line.

There has been life around Inch for far longer than the modern village. Across the Inch and Inch East townlands, archaeologists have identified middens (the shell-mound rubbish heaps that mark long use of a coastline for food gathering), ringforts (the round earthen enclosures that house small farms), and several ecclesiastical enclosure sites. In Inch East the graveyard enclosure contains the ruin of a single-cell church that has been dated to at least the thirteenth century. A single-cell church is a small thing, one rectangular room with a doorway and perhaps a single window slit, the simplest possible Christian building. Eight hundred years on, the walls are still recognisable, set among headstones in the lee of the dune system. Whoever maintained that church watched the same spit grow and shift across the same bay.

When David Lean came to shoot Ryan's Daughter, he was already a director with David's reputation: Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago behind him, Oscars on the shelf, and a fondness for landscape that few directors of his stature have matched. Ryan's Daughter, scripted by Robert Bolt, needed a coast that could carry the emotional weight of a story about a married woman and a shell-shocked British officer in 1916 Ireland, and the Dingle Peninsula gave him what he wanted. The schoolhouse at Kirrary, built for the film on Dunquin Heights, became its own minor attraction. Inch Strand, with its sweep and emptiness, served for the romantic and elemental moments. The film took a critical beating at the time. Its slow rehabilitation, and the strand's continuing capacity to look exactly the way Lean shot it, mean that walkers today often stop at the dune edge knowing they have seen this view before, even if they cannot remember where.

The village proper is small. There is a pub at the strand head, a few houses up the hill, a holiday park, and a long set of steps down through the dunes. The R561 carries day-trippers in from Annascaul and Castlemaine; in summer the car park overflows. On a winter afternoon you can have most of the five kilometres to yourself. Walk far enough out toward the tip and you reach a place where the bay opens on three sides: Dingle Peninsula behind, the Reeks across the water to the south, and Rossbeigh's matching spit reaching toward you from the Iveragh shore. The wind, almost always present, scours sand into low ripples and shifts the surface of the dunes over time. The thirteenth-century church watches all of this from a quarter mile inland, and has done so for eight hundred years.