It gives us both pleasure and pain to share the news that one of our favourite houses anywhere is now available to rent. It belongs to a friend of ours and we stay there every summer, and sometimes in the spring. We’ve been there with adults only, and taken loads of kids too, from babies to teenagers and either way it’s always a fantastic holiday. The house, set in an incredible valley near the small town of Caherdaniel, is a few minutes drive from Derrynane beach (see photo below), one of the most beautiful in Europe with acres of white sand overlooked by the ruins of a little abbey. There is everything there you want from a holiday in Ireland: great pubs, good local food, throw-back towns and villages, loads of amazing walks – in the mountains above the house or around the spectacular coast line. You can go horse riding on the beach (our kids particularly loved this), sign up for water sports like surfing or body-boarding, go prawning, fishing and cycling. Or just lie around the house reading or playing games or staring at the landscape and the ever-shifting weather.
It rains a lot in Kerry – there’s no way round it – but the great thing about this house and the fact that it’s glass, is that you never feel holed up inside, held hostage by the weather. The other fact about Kerry weather, rain and all, is that it changes all the time. We’ve been going for years and, save for one gloriously hot summer, it’s never not rained. And yet a day hasn’t passed that we haven’t made it to the beach. The house – a stunner – was relatively recently built too, so it’s cosy and warm while being light and airy. It sleeps 8 comfortably, is owned by a keen cook, so the kitchen is really well equipped, and in the evenings, you can project and watch movies on the big white living room wall (there’s a great DVD collection there as well as a huge library of books). But you can get all the details about the house, and see lots more photos, from the website.
We adore this part of Ireland, and this house in particular, so we can’t recommend it enough (we even wrote about it for Vogue a few years ago), even if its being rented curtails us using it as often as we’d like. Fair enough. And because we’re recommending a house we know so well, owned by a friend, we’ve organised a special 15% discount for any of our readers who might want to rent it. You get the discount simply by quoting ‘A Little Bird.’
