Charitable Travel's TIPs: Sustainable Ireland

Join us as we visit an impressive spot on the Wild Atlantic Way, on the West Coast of Ireland in this episode of Charitable Travel's Travel Insider Podcast series, in partnership with Tourism Ireland.

Positioned between the Atlantic Sea and the Killarney National Park, Derrynane is home to John Fitzgerald and his wife Kerryann, who own and run the Atlantic Irish Seaweed company in this remote spot. Bec wants to know what makes this place so special, and how seaweed is revolutionising Ireland's sustainable dining scene...

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Transcript

Charitable Travel's TIPs: Sustainable Ireland
 
Rebecca Miles: Hello, and welcome to Charitable Travel’s Travel Insider Podcast. My name's Rebecca Miles. I'm a travel journalist and the host of this podcast series that otherwise is known as TIPs. We hope to give you lots of great traveller tips today, but mostly we intend to transport you from wherever you are right now, perhaps you're walking through the park or maybe you're squashed into a crowded commuter train, to a place that will inspire you. 

Today we're traveling to the West Coast of Ireland to the county of Kerry, and a spot between the Atlantic Sea and the Killarney National Park. Derrynane is on the ring of Kerry and is part of the pristine coastline you'll find on the Wild Atlantic Way.

Here we find John Fitzgerald and his wife Kerryann, who own and run the Atlantic Irish Seaweed company in this remote spot by the sea. The pair run seaweed discovery courses and workshops, allowing and encouraging visitors to the area to learn more about the many incredible benefits of seaweed. This rugged stretch of coastline at the western edge of Europe has a temperate climate, and in the sea beneath the nearly 2000 feet high cliffs and crashing on the Goldie Sandy beaches, you'll find over 600 of the world's 10,000 seaweed species. With views out to the Skellig Islands, 13 miles offshore, and its 6th century monastic ruins.

Visiting the Kerry coast can feel like traveling to a different time. But fortunately, Cork Airport is actually only a two-hour drive away and Kerry airport is even closer with direct flights to the UK. But I'm not going to tell you all about this. I'm going to let John do the talking and paint the picture of visiting this very special corner of Ireland for us.

Thanks so much for joining us, John. I'm sure a lot of our listeners will have heard how stunning, the West Coast of Ireland is, and that may have even seen it for themselves, but could you tell us what makes your patch around Derrynane so special? 

John Fitzgerald: Sure, Beck. We're blessed with an incredible rugged coastline. We're right here at the edge of Europe with the magnificent Northeast Atlantic. We've also got the gulf stream washing up here. So we've got almost a temperate kind of a hint of a climate here. So we're way different than if you were to travel a few hours north. We're blessed with milder winters.

We’ve got a larger and more diverse range of fish species and seaweed species, and plant species because of our situation here. So, the water's warm enough to swim all year round, my wife tells me. 

Rebecca Miles: You're not a fan yourself?

John Fitzgerald: I do swim but I’m more of a warm water swimmer. 

Rebecca Miles: I understand you grew up in Cork but used to holiday on the coast. You’ve now lived near Derrynane for 30 years. What is it that drew you back to the sea and convinced you to stay? 

John Fitzgerald: Well, I guess in all my travels, I never lived too far from saltwater. But I guess there's some magnetism here, with the Skellig Islands in the distance, it's just one of the most beautiful places I've ever visited.

We were lucky enough to be brought here as children from Cork City, which is two hours away, and we would've spent all our summers here. And then wherever I was in the world, North America, the UK, I kept getting pulled back to here… and we were lucky enough to settle here and eke out a living from the ocean.

Rebecca Miles: Fabulous. Tell me where here is exactly. What can you see? Are you in your study at the moment? What can you see out the window?

John Fitzgerald: I'm in the kitchen. I'm in the kitchen of our house and we've got the ocean, literally a stone throw away. And we're also surrounded by… we've got a lovely little river rowing and flowing nearby the house.

And lots and lots of trees and the mountains up behind us. So as farmland goes, this is designated as disadvantaged, but it's not the ginormous rolling fields that you might see further north or further east in, in the golden veil around. Like in Cork, Tipperary, and Milford, with the large, large farms. This is more mountains and bog and rock, trees, and of course ocean. It sounds incredible. 

Rebecca Miles: So it's right on the tip. We're talking right down on the tip of the southwest, aren't we? 

John Fitzgerald: Yes. So leaving here. First stop 12 kilometres off you have the Skellig Islands, and then the next step after that is North America.

Rebecca Miles: Crikey. Okay. Now tell me, seaweed, it's a very specialist thing, isn't it? How did you become such a fan of this incredible plant? 

John Fitzgerald: Well, I had studied science in university before taking off for America and going on my travels. When I came back here, I would hang out in, in the ocean all the time fishing, swimming and snorkelling and all the rest.

So I would've been grazing all along, and just there was an increased interest in seaweed starting maybe 15-20 years ago. There was a lady who I was actually in college with who wrote a big book called, The Irish Seaweed Kitchen, and that became an international bestseller. It was being mentioned on the radio a lot and she was being interviewed and my ears pricked and I started to pay more attention and more attention, and then start researching and reading, and researching and reading. And I guess, it just started to bloom naturally then. 

Rebecca Miles: Literally. Seaweed, it's such an incredibly sustainable resource. I'd love to know more about the benefits of seaweed. I understand it's having a big impact on the local food scene. 

John Fitzgerald: Sure, we had a French chef here the other day now who's running a five-star restaurant in a big fancy hotel, and we had him at the shore for a few hours.

If you go back 10 years, I would've gotten, one call a year from a chef. Now we're getting, a few calls a week. It seems certainly if you're going up the food chain, no pun unintended towards Mitchelin and Stars and stuff, you got to have seaweed on your menu. You know that the whole foraging thing is so on trend also.

But I guess part of that might be driven by people being less trustful of large corporations and how they may or may not have had our best interests in heart, at heart all along. So they're kind of trying to look for more sustainable, but more honest foods, if you like. And then of course there's exponential research going on into seaweeds and their benefits, which are vast and, and we're finding out more and more stuff everyday about, about how good these plants are for us. 

Rebecca Miles: Can you tell me more about those benefits? What is it? Is it simply from eating it or are there other benefits too? 

John Fitzgerald: Well, let's say ingesting lots of seaweed has active compounds and molecules in them, which aren’t present in in any land plants. And these, can do some amazing stuff. 

Say take Bladder Wrack fucus vesiculosus a really common, brown seaweed that you'd have there all over the coast of the UK. It's the one with the paired air bladders that the kids tend to pop. This contains a substance called a Fucoidan, and it's a sulfated polysaccharide.

In Japan, they've, they've published the medical papers, the research has taken place, and they learned that the Fucoidan in the Bladder wrack binds Helicobacter pylori bacteria in the gut. So H. Pylori is really harmful for bacteria around. One in 10 of us in the west are unlucky enough to be afflicted by it. We go to the doctors, they, they send us to, they put us on antibiotics, and antibiotics and more antibiotics.

And then if we're unlucky, we can't beat it. We got to get triple bypass surgery. Whereas in Japan, if you go to a medical doctor, she or he will send you down to the local shop to buy this fucus vesiculosus, which is one of our most common seaweeds, like there's billions. There's tons of them around the coast.

If you take that twice a day and you, the doctor will say, come back and see them again in a month. And what it does is it continually flushes out. So right there in that common plant that we would've traditionally use as fertilizer, maybe a, maybe a bit of animal feed, if we're using it at all, that contains a remedy for something that's really harmful to us.

Rebecca Miles: That's incredible. And it's just growing there, right on the shore, hiding in plain sight, in vast abundance. It's incredible. Any other specifics? 

John Fitzgerald: Sure. There's got Egg wrack, another really common one that's the traditional one for fertilizer. This would be the giant single air bladders in a row.

It's a brown seaweed that lives near Bladder wrack on, on between the high and the low water mark. You'll always see it when you go down to the shore that contains a substance which softens black and tarter on your teeth and gums. So, there's a company in Sweden with a subsidiary actually in the UK and another subsidiary in Ireland.

And they, they figured this out because their dog started eating the young shoots of this when they took them for a walk at the beach. And the dog was really old and with bad teeth and gums. And after a few weeks, they noticed there was a vast improvement here. So they took a chance and they brought it home, they dried it, powdered it, and sent it off for analysis, and they hit the jackpot because there's an active compound in there that softens plaque and tartar on your teeth and gums.

So for about seven or eight years now, I've been showing their product on our walks just because I love the fact that they stopped and then they paid attention to the dog and they said, there's something going on here. And then they said let's take a chance. And they've spent a few hundred bucks checking it, having it analysed, and now they've made millions supplying this, this product, which is just that seaweed Ascophyllum nodosum or Egg wrack just dried and powdered.

So they sell it in a little tub for your dog or a bigger tub, or a little tub for your cat. And after about six or seven years, they brought out a human version. So that's the exact same thing, that it's inside in a cell loose capsule and you just take a capsule in the morning and a capsule in the evening. It dissolves in your gut.

It appears in your saliva, but it's colourless, tasteless and odourless so you don't know it's there and it's working night and day on your teeth and gums. So again, yeah, so clever and they've made an absolute fortune. And, uh, I show the product. I don't sell it, but I show it because I just love the fact that they paid attention and it paid off.

Because we, a lot of the time we go out into nature, but our eyes are, might only be half open or we've pre preconceived notions about what's actually going on there. 

Rebecca Miles: That’s so true.

John Fitzgerald: We're very arrogant. When it, when it can come to science, we have a tendency to think we're the smartest guy in the room. 

Rebecca Miles: Yes, you're right. Cause you sell on your, on your website you sell cutlery. That's right. Is that right? From, um seaweed. 

John Fitzgerald: Sure. Yes, that’s right. I had a background, um, at one stage I went back to university in North Hampton. The British School of Leather Technology there in the University of North Hampton, who, who were very good to me. And I, I had this, um, totally normal obsession with attempting to turn the skin of fishes into leather. So…

Rebecca Miles: Oh, I mean, everyone does that, don't they? 

John Fitzgerald: Yeah. Everybody goes through that phase, right? It's, it's like, you know, getting an earring or something. So this cost me about three years, but I went back and forth to North Hampton with the loads of, um, salted salmon skins and eventually, I came up with a, an amazing formula and we used to make wallets and handbags and belts and dog collars and so, and shoes at one stage. 

The same principle when I looked at the, the giant kelp rods being washed up after the southerly gales in the wintertime. These are obviously, this is the forest kelp, Laminaria hyperborean. So I was going, looking at this saying, right, this is the ancestors of the forest here on land. Could we do anything with these rods. Is there a way of curing them? Stabilizing them? 

So the same principle is tanning. You take out what you don't want, you put in what you do want you, you lock it down, and then you polish it up and you, if it looks good…you might find a purpose for it. So we did this and my wife and I, we messed around with some cutlery pieces and we made the most beautiful handles, which look a bit like deer horn.

So, at the moment as we speak, my wife is out in the workshop working on a commission for a Norwegian restaurant called Under, under.no I know is their website, and it's a Michelin starred underwater restaurant. So, it's under the ocean, it's under the Atlantic. You go in at sea level, you walk down, you're sitting there eating.

If you can get a table, I think there's something like an eight-month waiting list, but, um, and you'd have to sell your car to eat there. So, we're hoping to deliver that, that order in in probably be November. But what we've got then is this amazing story, whereby seaweeds come up out of the Atlantic, thrown up by the storm, their storm cast onto our Skellig coast here on the Wild Atlantic Way. 

We collect them, we repurpose them, and six months later they go back where they belong back under the ocean. This time in the, in the, the best restaurant in Norway. 

Rebecca Miles: Gosh, So gorgeous. So cyclical. It's wonderful. 

John Fitzgerald: Yeah. 

Rebecca Miles: I get the impression that seaweed has been really important throughout Kerry's history. When did people first realize the importance of seaweed?

John Fitzgerald: Well, we've got evidence here of early settlers down there in the harbour. We've got what's called a shell midden. This is listed in the national monuments as an archaeological find and on the north side of Abby Island in Derrynane Harbour.

And what's there is basically the soil is peat, so it's acidic, so it's brilliant at preserving. What would've happened way back in the day, they would've gathered seaweeds and shellfish, sat around in a circle, chatted about the big game or whatever. Then they would have thrown through the empty seashells into a pit or a hole in the ground. Then they would've covered that in so they weren’t annoyed by vermin, which back then would've probably been seabird, seagulls and such. 

Because the rats didn’t arrive from the West until thousands of years later. They haven’t carbon dated the shell midden, but they say it could date back up to 10,000 years, which was when Ireland was settled first after the last ice age.

So we, we knew that after the last ice age when Ireland was first settled, they came across the ice bridge from Central Europe. They came across the ice bridge, then into Britain, and then across from Britain, into Ireland. And they always stayed by the coast. And this is repeated, um, all over the world. They stayed by the coast because they had a ready supply of food in the form of shellfish and seaweed all year round.

Every day of the year, there's a variety for you to choose from. It's kind of no special tools or skills required, which is what attracted me to it. And they thrived because they had a fantastic diet. They also had shelter in the sand dunes which they would borrow into like rabbits. They had fire and they had freshwater streams running down from the mountains.

So they had everything they needed right there. 

Rebecca Miles: Sounds like we could learn a lot from them.

John Fitzgerald: It's funny's funny that in, in North America, the same thing happened when they came across the icecap over from the north. They went down the Pacific side and the Atlantic side, and they hugged the coast all the way down.

So, they pinched in and then they, they repeated the process and went all the way down both sides of South America and it's referred as the Kelp Highway. Same thing happened on both main islands in Japan. They hugged the coast and if you think about it logically, the country would've been covered by forest back then. And if we remember old fairy tales if you went down to the woods, it never ended well. 

Well back then, if you went back 6,000-7,000 years and you went off into the forest for 15 minutes and were sat there laughing.

Rebecca Miles: Yeah.

John Fitzgerald: You’ve got bears, wolves, wild boars, and other tribes to worry about. And you quite simply would just get lost because you've never been in one before and you have no idea how to get in or out. And you haven't figured out the whole compass business, and your Google Earth isn't working.

Rebecca Miles: No. Incredible. So, coming a little bit more recent by a few thousand years. How about the, the monks, did they, they were important, weren't they? On the coast and, they really understood the benefits of the seaweed, didn't they?

John Fitzgerald: Well it’s almost as philosophical a question as scientific. If you take the monks on Skellig Michael, the UNESCO heritage site, that's 12 kilometres offshore. These guys went out there in the 6th century, and they stayed there from the 6th to the 12th century. But the word Skellig, translates from the Irish and from the Gaelic. 

It even sounds like if the word Skellig translates as chard or jagged rock, because that's essentially what it is out in the ocean.

Rebecca Miles: Yeah.

John Fitzgerald: It's not farmland. It's jagged, almost bear rock. So their diet out there was really, really tricky. They didn't have a goji berries, blueberry, citrus grove, or Amazon deliveries.

So, um, their source of vitamin C was hugely important, especially during the winter. 

Rebecca Miles: Mm-hmm. So, they ate one particular seaweed called Dulse, every day. So they gathered it when they could, but this was their sole source of Vitamin C, so they wouldn't have survived one winter out there on that bare rock without it.

Remember, at the time, this is the 6th-7th century. If you went past Skellig Michael, you went over the edge and down in, into the abyss because the world was flat. So, so it was the most remote place known to man.

Rebecca Miles: Of course. So I’ve got to ask what on earth attracted them to this barren rock on the edge of the world?

John Fitzgerald: Oh its quite simple really, the question is really what pushed them out. And it, it's warfare in Europe. It was the dark ages so Europe was perpetually at war. It was just bloodshed the whole time. So they swapped our image of the, the happy monk with his wine, women, and song. And they swapped that for the, the peace.

They needed peace to be able to do their stuff. They're meditating, they're praying, write their annals, practice science, all that. 

Rebecca Miles: Mm. 

So they swap the convenience, if you like, of the mainland for peace, to get on with what they wanted to do. So they went to the most remote place they could possibly get to, which was Skellige Michael, like that was more remote for us. Obviously, we're thinking of the Moon and Mars and wherever else. 

Back then this was more remote than any desert or, you know. So it's ironic then that in the early 9th century, the Norse Vikings started raiding Ireland. They raided Skellige Michael first in 814 AD and they continued to do it throughout the 9th century.

But the irony is that the Vikings carried the same seaweed, dillisk or dulse on every voyage for the same reason, for vitamin C to prevent scurvy. 

Rebecca Miles: These people were so wise. 

John Fitzgerald: Yeah. They, no, they couldn't write down say, the molecular structure of vitamin C. They didn't know how to spell it, but they knew if we eat this, our teeth stay in and if we don't eat it, our teeth fall out. It's that simple. 

So, the monks were the ones who always accumulated knowledge. I think the rest of us just accumulated grudges. That's the various churches were so deeply rooted in education is cause they were the custodians of civilization or their version of it.

And they were the gatherers and purveyors of knowledge. So they knew this. But again, I'd say it's almost more of a philosophical question than a historically one, because it's almost like you know who ate the first oyster? 

Rebecca Miles: Yes. 

John Fitzgerald: The answer of course is, I don't know because I wasn't there, you know?

But yeah, it's just interesting from a historical perspective then, that the monks were going to all these places, not just Skellig Michael, by the way, you've got places like Lindisfarne, et cetera. All of the remote monastic settlements to get away from the warfare and do their business.

But you've also got the Vikings then opening all the trade routes. Cause if you look at all the Irish coastal cities; Cork first, then Milford, then Dublin, then Limerick. These were all Viking trading posts. And the cities were essentially founded by the Vikings. The same happened, I believe, with the Danish Vikings in the UK.

St. Brendan, the navigator and Irish monk left Brandon in North Kerry, about two hours northwest of here, and he voyaged West. As far as North America, in the year 501 AD. There's a fabulous documentary made by the BBC and RTE TV documentary, you can look it up. It's called the Brendan Voyage. 

A British adventurer called Tim Severin, who sadly is no longer with us, he re-enacted the voyage. They rebuilt the boat using animal hides and using all the old tools. And they actually completed the voyage landing in Canada after leaving North Kerry. 

So, the Vikings did the same thing. Now, so that was early 6th century. The Vikings did the same thing some 200 years later. The Vikings also east as far as Russia and south as far as the Mediterranean. They opened up all these trade routes, like half the genetics of Iceland are from Scotland and Ireland. The Vikings, they have great PR, but they weren't the nicest. They stole women basically and brought them to Iceland as slaves.

By opening all these trade routes, it really shaped European history, that one particular seaweed. Because it allowed all those voyages you must remember. This is before the compass. It's before Google Earth. It's before any of this, and it was dilisk or dulse. That particular seaweed, by giving them vitamin C to prevent scurvy that allowed all that to happen. That's why it's all so tied to seaweed. It allowed the monks to survive. They wouldn't have survived one winter, never mind, 600 years out on those islands. It's all tied in. 

And then you take it if you, if you want to just jump forward over a thousand years later, the largest navy in the history of the world, that's the British Navy.

Figured out in 1747  that you’ve got to give your crew vitamin C every day to prevent scurvy in the form of citrus fruit. Hence earning the nicknames Limeys and Limey Land. So it was over a thousand years earlier, but the custodians of civilization out in Skellig Michael and Lindinsfarne and places like that, not just Skellig Michael and the marauding men from the north, the Norse and the Danish Vikings. They had the same knowledge. They couldn't explain it, but they knew you eat this your teeth stay in, you don't eat it, your teeth fall out.

So it really did, it shaped hundreds and hundreds of years of history. 

Rebecca Miles: And is it possible now to visit Skellig Island and see and sort of retrace those footsteps of the monks?

John Fitzgerald: Absolutely. I was in the harbour this morning delivering a small boat to a pal of mine and I saw our, our friend driving out there. There's trips daily in the summer months, and weather permitting, you can land, but it's very limited. So if it's on your bucket list and I believe it should be on everybody's bucket list, its an incredible place to visit. It's staggering. 

Rebecca Miles: And you mean there's no sort of harbour built there or Marina? 

John Fitzgerald: There's a small landing on the north side. No, they didn't get planning for the the marina. In certain conditions there’s a good chance most days in the summertime that you can land there. The boats are limited. The amount of boats, the quote, I believe there's 12 boats can carry 12 passengers each. It's well worth trying to book in advance trips to Skellig. It's absolutely spectacular. 

Rebecca Miles: Gorgeous. So tell me, what does a typical day look like for you? I imagine a typical day doesn't really exist, but…

John Fitzgerald: Thankfully not. I get up have breakfast, get on the tube, try not to fight with anybody and then I get up sneak home again and mow the lawn for a bit. Then I’ll watch Come Dine with Me and Desperate Housewives.

Thankfully there is no such thing as a typical day, but it would always involve going down to the shore at least once, if not two or three times. I think I've been there 4 times today. Now I have a tour after this and I will go to visit two sites at low tide to check what seaweeds are there and everyone gets to taste the seaweeds and learn about those particular ones, what they were used for in the past, what they're used for now, and also learn how to find them, how to identify them, how to sustainably harvest them. And they learn whether they like them or not.

I like the taste of them. I have to start every tour by saying two things. First of all, there’s no seaweeds in Irish waters that are toxic or in UK waters either. So once you're at a clean site, you're pretty safe. There's two things you've got to be a little bit careful of. One is that kelps contain a lot of iodine.

And Sea Lettuce, which is a green seaweed that looks like lettuce. You can't mistake it for anything else. If there's loads of that somewhere, it can mean that there's pollution. So you better go somewhere else to do your experiments and your harvesting. So, and obviously stay away from population bases, industry and intensive farming.

And thankfully we've none of the above here.

Rebecca Miles: So when, if visitors are joining one of your tours, is this the sort of thing you cover? 

John Fitzgerald: Absolutely. It's basically a stroll on the beach, right? So people find the concept daunting. They wonder do I need a wetsuit, you don't even need wellies.

You're just going to walk along the beach. I might have wellies, or I might be barefoot, and I'd go in a bit and grab the bits that are there. But we work with the tides, so we try and get their low tide which is when we see the most stuff. They get to, like I say, learn how to find, identify and sustainably harvest say 16 of the seaweeds. 

If we, if we get to see 14 or 16 of the seaweed and we get to learn what they're for, then at the end of each tour, everybody gets a pair of postcards. And on these postcards on the front is a seaweed image, but on the back is our website and our email. Then if they, if they send us an email, we send them on a coloured identification chart, the nutritional chart, and the synopsis of all the lies I told at the shore.

Rebecca Miles: Fabulous. So if you are visiting, what else beyond obviously spending some time with you, what else is there to do in the area? 

John Fitzgerald: Well, I'm very lucky. To work adjacent to Derrynane House and Gardens. Now, Derrynane House is a museum. It's an old house that's owned now by the state, but it was the ancestral home of Daniel O'Connell, the liberator, one of Ireland's most important statesmen.

And he would've been the best way to describe him. He would've been our Gandhi. So when he was born as a Catholic, he couldn't vote, own land or get an education. He was quite lucky to be raised by his uncle at Derrynane. His uncle had a smuggling business and he was smuggled to France with his brother Fred to be educated.

And he received a fabulous education and became an incredible lawyer. And then he entered politics. So by the time he died in 1847 those acts had been repealed. So, Catholics could own land, they could vote, and they could get an education. And he was a lifelong passivist. And very importantly he was an abolitionist. So incredible, incredible guy. So there's a lovely museum to him there. There's a lovely cafe there and there's a national park. 

So there's beautiful gardens and plants from all over the world. A lovely, lovely place to visit. Um, just up the road there's Staigue Fort. Dating back around 3000 years.

Rebecca Miles: Wow. 

John Fitzgerald: It's in the top two or three in the whole country. It's a huge stone fort. It's an incredible structure in great condition. Believed to have been owned by one of the top chieftains in the whole area that he would've brought his people into if there was danger coming in from the sea. So that's an amazing place to visit also. 

And then you can just go in, on or under the ocean. 

Rebecca Miles: Oh, brilliant. Okay. 

John Fitzgerald: Always a must. 

Rebecca Miles: Yeah. So it's all part of the wild Atlantic way, isn't it? How easy is it to get around? 

John Fitzgerald: We're on a strip of the Wild Atlantic way, in fact, on our business card. That's what it says. It says Graze the wild Atlantic Way. Don't just look at it. Get out of the car and walk along and go one step further and actually start to eat it because they'll tell you it's a roadway, but it, it's the rocks with the seaweed detached that is the actual Wild Atlantic Way. So you get to graze the Wild Atlantic Way or eat it. 

To get around you can hire a car. There's some really good coach tours that go around. We're on one loop. Klarney, Killimer and Cork are all very close by to this. Kerry airport is about an hour and a half away and Cork airport is about two hours away.

And then of course we have Rosslare Ferry, which is maybe four hours away. So you drive across yourself if you're coming from the UK or you fly in and rent a car or come with a reputable tour operator that stops and allows you to do the seaweed walk. 

Rebecca Miles: Yes. You don’t just want to whistle past all this, do you?

John Fitzgerald: No. 

Rebecca Miles: So lastly, if you had one day free to spend exactly as you wished in Kerry what would you do? 

John Fitzgerald: I guess, I'd pretty much do a lot of the stuff I'd be doing anyway. 

Rebecca Miles: Ha, You are so lucky.

John Fitzgerald: But people get so jealous when I start the tour by saying, okay, I'm working from home again today.

Rebecca Miles: What a spot. 

John Fitzgerald: Yeah, just incredible. So I guess it would all be, it'd all be under, or on the water. We'd probably take an early morning boat trip out, say hi to the Dolphins, maybe land on one of the islands out in Derryanne Bay and have a picnic, maybe visit some old archaeological sites out there.

There's one spectacular island just there in the bay called Scariff, which is 365 acres with an amazing history. It was occupied up until the 1930s and its beautiful farmland. It was basically a dairy farm that was just cut off from the mainland. So the two families that lived out there were working as dairy farmers. The butter came ashore then. And was exported out through Cork all over the world. 

But on the 23rd of June, 1653, an amazing guy called the Red Monk of Scarriff was murdered out there by Cromwellian Bounty Hunters because he was the head of the Franciscan order. So there, there was priest hunting at the time, if you like, but his body's still out there and his skull is in a friary in Killarney, there's just an amazing history on the island. 

You can go back 350 years just by standing out on the island and see how amazing times must have been back then, you know? But yeah, the place is packed with stuff to do. Like, absolutely. And of course, a trip to Skellig is a must.

Rebecca Miles: Definitely. Oh, fabulous. Well, thank you so much, John. It's been incredible hearing more about it. Thank you for joining us. 

John Fitzgerald: Wonderful. We’ll expect you to pop around the corner any day.

Rebecca Miles: We definitely will. Thank you. If you've been inspired today and want to find out more and book your next holiday to Ireland, visit www.charitable.travel today.

For more information on John and the work he does, visit www.atlanticirishseaweed.com or follow Atlantic Irish Seaweed on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. If you enjoy this episode, don't forget to rate and subscribers. You can also follow Charitable Travel on social media for even more travel inspiration.

Thanks for tuning in and see you soon for another 30 minute holiday.