MOTORCYCLE TRAVEL IN Ireland

For any motorcycle traveler researching Ireland by motorcycle for the first time, the Ring of Kerry by motorcycle is almost always the first name that comes up: 179 km of curves along the Atlantic around the Iveragh Peninsula, ridden by international tourism since the Victorian era.

From Waterville you can spot Skellig Michael, a Christian monastery founded between the 6th and 8th centuries on a 218-meter rock 11.6 km off the coast, declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1996 and used as a filming location for Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) and The Last Jedi (2017).

The final stretch skirts Killarney National Park, Ireland's first national park, created in 1932 when the Bourn-Vincent family donated the Muckross Estate to the Irish state in memory of Maud Vincent.

Riding the Causeway Coastal Route by motorcycle, especially its classic Antrim Coast Road stretch between Larne and Cushendall, means following a road that engineers William Bald, Thomas Woodhouse and Charles Lanyon finished cutting directly into the cliff between 1832 and 1842, blasting through limestone and basalt walls over 100 meters high to connect the Glens of Antrim with the rest of the coast.

A little further north, on the same coast, waits the Giant's Causeway: about 40,000 hexagonal basalt columns formed 50 to 60 million years ago by a volcanic fissure, declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1986. Local legend says they were built by the giant Fionn mac Cumhaill to cross over and fight his Scottish rival.

A few minutes away is the Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge, first strung over 350 years ago by salmon fishermen 30 meters above the rocks, and the Dark Hedges beech tunnel, planted in 1775 and made world-famous when Game of Thrones used it as the King's Road.

The Slea Head Drive by motorcycle is the mandatory closer to any pass through the Dingle Peninsula: a 47 km loop from Dingle town that skirts the westernmost point of mainland Ireland, with constant views of the Blasket Islands.

The last Blasket Islands residents were evacuated by the Irish government on November 17, 1953, due to extreme winter conditions; before that, the island gave world literature Irish-language authors like Tomás Ó Criomhthain and Peig Sayers, who documented a way of life that no longer exists anywhere else in Europe.

On the road you have to slow down: prehistoric stone forts, beehive huts built by the earliest Christian monks, and the Gallarus Oratory, built from dry stone without a drop of mortar over a thousand years ago, appear just meters from the pavement, with no sign to warn you.

Crossing the Conor Pass by motorcycle means climbing to 456 meters above sea level, Ireland's highest paved mountain pass, between the peaks of Binn Dubh and Sliabh Mhacha Ré, at the heart of the Dingle Peninsula.

The road is a narrow single lane cut into solid rock: if two vehicles meet, one of them has to reverse to the nearest passing place, and vehicles over two tonnes are banned outright to avoid the problem.

It's also one of the most famous and demanding climbs in Irish cycling, which says a lot about the gradient you have to climb on two wheels, motorized or not, between sharp cliffs and old glacial corrie lakes.

Among motorcycle travelers who already rode the Ring of Kerry, the Ring of Beara by motorcycle gets recommended over and over in forums as the real alternative: the same kind of Atlantic scenery, far less tour-coach traffic, because no coach operator runs through this peninsula.

The village of Allihies, at the western tip, was a copper mining center that shipped 297,000 tons of ore to the smelter in Swansea, Wales, between 1812 and 1912, until the collapse of world copper prices closed the mines in 1884 and sent many of its miners to try their luck in Butte, Montana.

The two mountain ranges separating Cork from Kerry, Caha and Slieve Miskish, took their current shape during the Quaternary period, just 12,000 years ago, which is why the Beara has the tight curves and sharp elevation changes of a genuinely technical route.

Climbing the Healy Pass by motorcycle to its 300-meter summit means crossing a road that began as a Great Famine poor-relief public works project, opened in the 1840s under the name Kerry Pass to give work to families with no other way to survive.

In 1931 it was renamed Healy Pass in honor of Tim Healy, the first Governor-General of the Irish Free State, who died shortly after the original road was improved.

Today it's pure zigzag through tight curves between the Caha Mountains, with simultaneous views of Bantry Bay to the southeast and the Kenmare estuary to the northwest, the kind of road one historian described as the legacy of well-intentioned but desperate initiatives from those years of hunger.

The Gap of Dunloe by motorcycle forces you to slow down through a U-shaped valley that a glacier from the Black Valley carved about 25,000 years ago, during the last ice age, as it pushed north through the mountains and left a breach between the MacGillycuddy's Reeks and the Purple Mountain group.

The road connects five chained lakes and passes the Wishing Bridge, where local tradition says any wish made on it comes true.

Although a sign at the entrance, at Kate Kearney's Cottage, suggests otherwise, it is a public road: any motor vehicle has the legal right of way, though in practice you have to share it with the horse-drawn jaunting cars running the tourist circuit.

Crossing the Sally Gap by motorcycle just an hour from Dublin is the most repeated weekend escape among local riders: the highest point of the road touches 503 meters, at the crossing with the historic Military Road.

Descending east reveals Lough Tay, the glacial corrie lake beneath Luggala mountain that everyone knows as the Guinness Lake, named for the brewing family's estate surrounding it, with an imported white-sand beach that contrasts with the near-black water.

The isolated valleys of this area served as filming locations for Braveheart (1995), and the road most likely follows a route used for thousands of years, long before the Military Road was opened in the 19th century to hunt down rebels hiding in these mountains.

The Sky Road by motorcycle is just an 11 km loop from Clifden, but it climbs over 150 meters above sea level at Slyne Head, with direct views of the island chain off the Connemara coast.

Near the highest point, in the Derrygimlagh bog, Alcock and Brown made an emergency landing on June 15, 1919, having completed the first non-stop transatlantic flight in history, and a short distance away Guglielmo Marconi installed the world's first transatlantic wireless station in 1907, which an armed group burned down in July 1922 during the Irish Civil War.

It's the shortest route in this whole Top 10, but it packs two milestones of world communications and aviation history into less than an hour of riding, with the Atlantic Ocean in the background on every curve.

The Inishowen 100 by motorcycle is the roughly 100-mile (161 km) signposted loop that, according to Fáilte Ireland, marks the starting -or finishing- point of the entire Wild Atlantic Way, the 2,500 km coastal touring route running through nine Irish counties since its official 2014 launch.

The emotional high point is Malin Head, the northernmost point of mainland Ireland, where an 1805 Napoleonic watchtower and an 1902 Marconi signal station still stand, and where scenes from Star Wars: The Last Jedi were filmed in 2017.

Inland, the Mamore Gap climbs to 213 meters past St. Eigne's Well, where every year, between August 15 and September 8, a traditional turas or pilgrimage is still held; local legend says it was on this very pass that Saint Columba defeated the water dragon Giollamach.