Crashing in Cahersiveen
Life in a Small Irish Town
We are now halfway through a 4.5 week stay in the small town of Cahersiveen. (I think it is pronounced something like “ka – hair – suh – veen” but don’t hold me to that. It is also sometimes spelled Cahirciveen.) How did we end up in a random small town in western Ireland? It’s actually a long story.
A major limitation to our trip was complying with European visa restrictions. If you’ve heard that the EU has open borders, you’ve actually heard about the Schengen Area. There are 22 members of the Schengen Area. It’s basically all of northern and western continental Europe, including a few countries that are not EU members (Norway, Switzerland, Iceland). Ireland, which is an EU member, and the United Kingdom, which recently left the EU, are not Schengen Area members and instead enforce their own borders (in addition to having a special arrangement to allow open travel of Irish citizens to the UK and vice versa). The Balkan countries, with the exception of Greece, are also not Schengen Area members. I find it a lot easier to keep straight with a visual aid:
Once you’re inside a Schengen country, you’ve effectively been admitted to all of them. For example, we had our passports stamped at the Munich airport and then traveled to Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, and Italy without having them checked again. We did, however, make sure to get an exit stamp at the airport in Rome.
As Americans, we don’t need to have a visa to go to Europe, but we are only allowed in the Schengen Area for 90 days within any one 180-day period. That is a rolling 180-day period. Because we were planning to be in the Schengen Area for more than 90 days in total, we needed to leave the Schengen Area for 91 days in the middle of our trip to be compliant.
For our two Schengen legs, we explored a variety of countries—France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Portugal—and ultimately decided upon Austria, Italy, and Spain. That left us with Ireland, the UK, and the Balkans for our summer months out of the Schengen Area.
We explored a few different spots in western Ireland as places to stay for a while, everything from Cork up to Clifden and Westport in the northwest. Most tourists stop through these cities and smaller towns after renting a car, but we knew we would be without one. So we were looking for a town big enough to have a grocery store or two and a few restaurants and pubs.
At first, we narrowed in on Valentia Island, a small island off the Iveragh Peninsula, the largest peninsula in southwestern Ireland and known for the Ring of Kerry scenic drive. But as we researched more and emailed with a few people there, we realized that we’d be limited to only a few shops in the main “city” of Knightstown, as settlement of only a few hundred people. Knightstown locals seemed to do a lot of their shopping in the first major town on the mainland, Cahersiveen. So Cahersiveen it was.
Caherisveen seems to be the commercial hub of this part of the peninsula. County Kerry is quite rural overall so even with only 1,041 residents, Cahersiveen cracks the top 10 largest towns in the county. Ireland has a census currently underway, and I suspect that population count will have increased in the 2022 census. Our Airbnb host told us there are a few hundred newly arrived Ukrainian refugees in town.
For a place that by my standards is a very small town, Caherisveen is surprisingly livable. Everything one needs on a daily basis can be purchased here. There are at least five grocery stores: an ALDI, Centra (an Irish chain that operates a few sizes of stores, from small convenience store to larger grocery store), Walsh’s SuperValu (also an Irish chain, they tend to be full-size supermarkets), and two small shops selling local goods. There’s also a shop that sells fresh fish. There are two pharmacies, a doctor’s office, optical office, and a small hospital. There’s a hardware store, a few clothing and shoe stores, and a few shops selling home goods. There are a few pubs and even a French bakery run by a few French ladies.
The main street of the town is quite appealing on a sunny day. The shops are colorful, many featuring equally vibrant displays of flowers in the window boxes. There are large green hills immediately south of the town and across the small bay to the north. On a clear day, we can see the ruins of Ballycarbery Castle across the bay.
That said, there is not very much in terms of attractions. The town is part of the Kerry International Dark-Sky Reserve, although it has been too cloudy most nights to make for good stargazing. There are some hiking trails and two stone forts in the hills across the bay. As mentioned, Valentia Island is nearby. The Skelligs, small rocky islands that were used as a filming location in the newest Star Wars trilogy (the place where Rey finds Luke), are also not too far away.
Alex and I are hoping to explore more of these scenic spots over the next couple of weeks. Our discoveries so far have been more mundane.
Up until now, we’ve had minimal encounters with any unusual infrastructure. Sure, we’ve had to use adapters to charge our phones and computers, and our hotels in Italy had bidets in the bathroom. I’ve gotten used to setting the oven to a temperature in Celsius, although I still don’t really know how to take full advantage of a convection oven. But overall, we haven’t felt like living in a Viennese or Italian apartment was that different from an American one.
Our Irish apartment has a few major differences, mostly all related to heating water. The entire apartment runs on electricity, so there is no gas-based boiler heating the water. When we first got here, we thought that the hot water was broken or had been turned off. After Googling and messaging with our host, we learned about immersion heaters.
These heating systems are quite common in Ireland and other countries where gas isn’t standard. An electric coil heats up a small tank of water. You have to turn the immersion on, select whether you want enough hot water to fill a sink or bath, and then wait a bit for the water to become hot. It’s not recommended to leave the immersion on all the time.
The shower has an electric showerhead. This is a separate device from the immersion that heats up the water coming out of the showerhead (but not the hot water tap for the bath, which requires the immersion). It works somewhat like a kettle, boiling the water electronically before it comes out of the showerhead. It sounds weird, but it works okay.
Otherwise, it is a perfectly nice place to live. The people are friendly. Everyone in the town seems to know one another, and they greet each other by first name. There is local pride and spirit; all the shops hung Kerry flags in their windows this weekend in support of the team playing in the semi-finals of the national Gaelic football championship. (They won.) And when you do venture out along the Ring of Kerry, the views are spectacular. I’ll leave you with a preview and a promise to share more amazing coastal views in our next post.
I will definitely require ‘show and tell’ in order to take a shower! Can’t wait to see the two of you.