Qualla: Inch, County Kerry

Inch, County Kerry: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

David Lean filmed parts of Ryan's Daughter on Inch Strand in the late 1960s, and for a stretch in 1969 the largest film unit ever assembled in Ireland camped at the edge of this five-kilometre sand spit, waiting for the kind of light only the West Kerry coast produces. The film was a flop on release and a slow-built classic afterwards; the strand has not changed. Inch is a small coastal settlement and townland on the Dingle Peninsula, slung along the R561 between Annascaul and Castlemaine. Behind the dunes the village is quiet. In front of them the Atlantic curls in over a tongue of sand so long that, walking out toward its tip, you can feel the whole peninsula behind you grow small.

Read more: Inch, County Kerry on Qualla

Inch, County Kerry: The Spit That Reaches Across the Bay

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

Read more: Inch, County Kerry on Qualla

Inch, County Kerry: Older Than the Sand

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 th...

Read more: Inch, County Kerry on Qualla

Inch, County Kerry: Ryan's Daughter and the Light

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 Rober...

Read more: Inch, County Kerry on Qualla

Inch, County Kerry: A Walk From the R561

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 c...

Read more: Inch, County Kerry on Qualla