Reserve a stay in West Cork for a week, three weeks or a season

West Cork is the bottom left corner of Ireland. Five peninsulas run out into the Atlantic from about forty miles of coast, with a bay between each one, and the road onto a peninsula is usually the road back off it. The distances read small on a map and are not. Skibbereen to Castletownbere is 85 km and takes an hour and forty minutes, because the road goes around Bantry Bay instead of across it. That one fact decides most of what a week here can hold and most of what it cannot.

What you reserve is a house in one of those places: a stone cottage with two bedrooms, a wing of a working farm, or two rooms over a square in one of the towns. It is the same house at all three lengths. What changes is how much of the year you are standing inside while you are in it, and on this coast that turns out to be the whole of the difference. Seven nights is a visit. Twenty one nights is long enough for the weather to show you two different versions of the same headland. Fifty six nights is long enough that the woman who opens the shop at eight stops telling you where things are.

All three figures are per person with two people sharing, and not one of them contains a flight. The long leg across the ocean is yours to arrange, because airfare is not something this office handles.

The five peninsulas do not repeat each other

Beara is the mountain one. Hungry Hill stands at 685 m and drops a waterfall down its face that only runs for a day or two after heavy rain. The Healy Pass climbs to 334 m and crosses the Caha range in twelve kilometres of hairpins, and in a hard January week it can be shut for ice at nine in the morning and open again by two. Castletownbere works as a fishing port rather than as a view of one: the pier is lit and busy at four in the morning, and the town keeps its hours from that.

Sheep's Head is the narrow one. It is a single ridge about four miles across at the widest, with one road running out along it, 88 km of waymarked path, and no shop of any kind past the last village. The road ends at a car park and the walk from there to the point takes about forty five minutes each way over ground that holds water.

Mizen ends where the cliff does. Mount Gabriel sits behind it at 407 m with two white domes on top that can be seen from most of the bay, which is how people here give directions. Barleycove has a floating boardwalk over the dune system and its parking fills by eleven on a dry Sunday in August. Past Crookhaven the road simply stops.

East of those the coast flattens into headlands and strands, firm sand at Inchydoney and at Red Strand, and then Roaringwater Bay with roughly a hundred islands in it, a handful of them lived on all year. Crossings out to those islands are timetabled, sold and billed by the companies that hold the licence for the passage. Neither the fare nor the schedule is set here, and neither one is part of what you reserve through this office.

What the second and third weeks do

This coast gets rain on something like 200 days a year. Most of it is not weather in the dramatic sense, just a grey that comes in off the water and sits on the hill for three days. A seven night reservation is one draw against that. You will probably get four or five days with rain somewhere in them and one that stays clear from morning until dark, and that one clear day decides whether you drive the pass or look at the cloud where the pass is.

Twenty one nights is three draws. It is also long enough for the calendar to move underneath you. Bantry holds its market on Friday in the square; Skibbereen holds its on Saturday morning at the Fairfield and it is packed away by two. In a single week you catch one of each and cannot tell which one is the usual one. In three weeks you learn that the Friday market thins in the back half of the month, that the fish comes to the Saturday one, and that the second silage cut at the end of July puts tractors on every lane for about ten days.

Eight weeks is a different product rather than a longer one, and the mechanics change first. A house let for a week is turned over every Saturday: cleaned, stripped, remade, let again. A house let for eight weeks is turned over once. The nightly figure the owner writes reflects that, and it is already inside the three prices above: $345 a night at seven nights, $263 a night at twenty one, $194 a night at fifty six. Linen moves to a fortnightly change and the machine in the utility room becomes yours to use as you like.

Then the year moves. Take a season from the first week of September and you get the last fortnight of mackerel off the piers, blackberries in the hedges from the end of August, seabird passage off the southwest headlands through the back half of September, the clocks going back on the last Sunday in October and sunset landing at 17:15 the following evening. Reserve the same eight weeks from the middle of April instead and you get wild garlic in the wooded valleys behind Glengarriff, lambs on the hill fields, the first silage cut, and daylight stretching from twelve hours to sixteen while you sit in it.

The year here, month by month

Nothing in this list is a schedule anybody can be held to. It is what the year does on this coast, and it is the reason the same house reserved in February and reserved in July is not the same reservation.

How the weeks are held

You send the dates, the peninsula, the number of people and anything that would spoil it for you: stairs, a dog, a real need for working broadband. Slow Latitudes writes to the houses that are open across your weeks and comes back with a price set against those exact dates, usually inside two to four working days. Nothing is held while you think about it, and nothing is asked of you in the meantime.

This office holds title to nothing it reserves for you. There is no fleet in a yard, no beds on its own books and no berths of any kind on this side of the arrangement. Every night you reserve belongs to somebody else: the owner of the cottage, the family with the farm, the couple with the four rooms over the square. Once the reservation is placed, the party that runs the weeks is the party that sends the bill, direct to you and on its own terms. Slow Latitudes Bookings LLC takes no payment at any stage, and there is nothing to settle on this page.

The flight stays outside all of it, and so does anything to do with entry documents. Those sit between you and the authority that issues them, and nobody here advises on them in any form.

Should you prefer to say it aloud first, the line is +1 (225) 766-2418, and the office is at 9422 Common Street, Suite 2, Baton Rouge, LA 70809, in East Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Written requests go to bookings@slowlatitudes.com. If something on this page is wrong, and on a coast that redraws its crossing timetables twice a year something eventually will be, send it to corrections@slowlatitudes.com and it gets corrected.