Overview
Two rocky islands called Adam and Eve guard the mouth of Glandore Harbour, and the old advice to sailors – ‘avoid Adam and hug Eve’ – still holds: Adam’s side hides the reefs. That sheltered, oak-fringed inlet (Cuan Dor means ‘harbour of the oaks’) is the whole point of Glandore, a village of barely one street on the water off the N71, about 10 km east of Skibbereen and just over an hour west of Cork city.
Be straight about scale and season: this is a small place that lives for sailing and fills up in July and August, and goes very quiet the rest of the year. That quiet is a feature if you want the coastal walks to yourself in spring or autumn – just don’t expect much open midweek in winter.
What to do
If you do one thing here, drive the couple of kilometres east to Drombeg Stone Circle – 17 standing stones of local sandstone, raised in the Bronze Age, free to visit with a car park right beside it. Go early; it’s one of the best-known prehistoric sites in the country and the parking is small.
In the village itself, the harbour is the draw: walk the 19th-century stone pier at low tide for the rock pools and the seals on the ledges, and watch the dinghy fleet race on a summer evening. Christ Church (Kilfaughnabeg, ‘the little church of Fachtna’) sits above the bay, consecrated in 1861 and reached by a tunnel cut through the rock – an oddly theatrical approach to a small country church; its bell was cast by the Murphy foundry in 1889. The Gulf Stream keeps the place mild enough that coastal flowers bloom out of season, and the harbour and bay turn up grey herons, oystercatchers, gannets and shags, with seals hauled out on the rocks and dolphins, porpoises and the odd whale further out towards Galley Head.
Sailing
Sailing is what Glandore is for. The Glandore Harbour Yacht Club, founded in 1985 and based near the pier on Old School Road, runs more than 16 courses a year for juniors and adults, from dinghies up to powerboat and instructor training, and races a fleet of Dragons, Squibs and Topaz dinghies. Two events bookend the season: the annual regatta on the third weekend of August, with the Lar Casey Cup for the Dragon class, and the Glandore Classic Boat Regatta, a week-long gathering of vintage boats held in the second week of July in odd-numbered years. If you’re not sailing, local boat owners run sea-angling trips out of nearby Union Hall.
A bit of history
Glandore was one of the earliest settlements in West Cork: the Normans built two castles here in 1215 to control the inlet, and the O’Donovan clan later took them over. The village you see was largely the work of one man – James Redmond Barry, who in the early 19th century built the pier, set up a boatyard at Union Hall, founded schools, opened the Glandore Inn in 1828 and organised the first regatta in 1830. It was not all prosperity: Glandore lost 45% of its population in the Great Famine. An earlier resident worth a footnote is William Thompson, the philosopher and one of the first socialists, who ran a co-operative commune nearby as a model for his ideas. More recently the one-lane Poulgorm Bridge over to Union Hall stood in for a village in David Puttnam’s film War of the Buttons, and the harbour was a backdrop for the Netflix series Bodkin.
Getting there and practical notes
- By car: west from Cork city on the N71 (about 80 km), signposted near Leap. There’s free parking at the village car park by the harbour and at beach access points.
- By bus: services run from Skibbereen to Union Hall; from there it’s a short taxi into Glandore.
- Beaches: Keelbeg Strand by the pier is the handy sandy one; The Cusheen is a quieter cove, Myross Slip a gravel beach good for low-tide rock-pooling, and Squince and Trá an Oileáin are worth the short drive for a longer walk.
- Access: the harbour promenade and village centre are level and wheelchair-friendly; the rock tunnel up to Christ Church has a gradient that may not suit all mobility aids. Dogs on leads are welcome on the coastal walk to Union Hall.
For the best of it on a summer trip, get to Drombeg before the coaches, then take an evening pint at the Glandore Inn and watch the Dragons come back in off the bay.