The Slea Head Drive packs more than 2,000 archaeological sites into a loop of roughly 47 kilometres, one of the densest concentrations of early Christian and prehistoric remains in western Europe. The peninsula that carries them is the most westerly point of mainland Ireland, a finger of Old Red Sandstone pushed into the Atlantic and worn smooth by weather that arrives with nothing between it and Newfoundland. The road from Killarney climbs before it descends. Travellers on a killarney to dingle private tour leave the lakes and oakwoods of Killarney National Park behind and cross the Slieve Mish mountains, either by the Conor Pass — Ireland's highest surfaced mountain pass at 456 metres — or by the gentler coastal approach through Inch Strand, whose five-kilometre sandbar appeared in David Lean's Ryan's Daughter in 1970. Both routes converge on Dingle town, known in Irish as Daingean Uí Chúis, a working fishing harbour of some 2,000 residents. What gives the peninsula its weight is continuity. The Gallarus Oratory, a drystone chapel shaped like an upturned boat, has stood without mortar for something between 1,100 and 1,300 years and remains watertight. The Reasc Pillar, incised with Celtic spirals, marks a monastic settlement excavated in the 1970s. Beehive huts — clocháin — cluster on the slopes above Fahan in their hundreds. Offshore, the Blasket Islands were inhabited until 1953, when the last twenty-two residents were evacuated to the mainland; the islands produced an improbable body of Irish-language literature, including Tomás Ó Criomhthain's An tOileánach. This is Gaeltacht country. Irish remains the daily working language across the western half of the peninsula, and road signs west of Dingle town appear in Irish only. Guided Dingle Peninsula tours from Killarney are, for many visitors, the first sustained encounter with a living Celtic language rather than a museum one. The landscape itself does the rest. Mount Brandon rises to 952 metres, the second-highest peak in Ireland outside the MacGillycuddy's Reeks, and carries a pilgrim path associated with St Brendan the Navigator. Sea stacks off Slea Head take the full weight of Atlantic swell. Coumeenoole Strand sits in a natural amphitheatre of cliff. A killarney to dingle private tour covers ground that took generations to name, and the names — Dún Chaoin, Ceann Sléibhe, Baile an Fheirtéaraigh — still hold.