Barely a hundred yards from the cliff edge, my guide's face went blank. As we peered down into the long sea cave beneath our feet, I'd asked him a particularly tricky question.

Seamus Daly was born less than a mile away, and for the last hour we'd been walking across his 400-acre holding. Surely, I thought, he'd know the name of this cove ..? He frowned for a moment at my inquiry, before the smile returned to his kindly, weather-beaten face. "Everyone here just calls it The Cove," he replied, "so you might as well call it that, too."

Names can be elastic in this part of West Cork. On the map, I was staying at Reenmore Farmhouse; here, on the smallest of the five rocky fingers sticking out from south-west Ireland's Atlantic coast, it was universally known as "Jenny Barry's". But though the locals use nicknames for both people and places, they have produced "... one of the most attractive maps ever made in Ireland" to guide walkers around the 55-mile Sheep's Head Way.

The cigar-shaped path which loops around the full length of the Sheep's Head peninsula was the brainchild of a lean, energetic and immensely likeable American. Tom Whitty came to Cork from Philadelphia as a student in 1973, met his wife, and decided to settle here. "I guess the hardest thing was getting permission for walkers to use the route," he told me, paying tribute to the help of his small Development Committee. "Most of these walks are developed by local authorities, but this was a community project - we did it all ourselves."

If the Sheep's Head Way is home-made, it's certainly not amateurish; and already it's attracting groups of walkers as well as independently-minded couples. "The route's very well waymarked" commented Joy Riley of the Milton Keynes Ramblers, who were spending a day on the trail, "so there's no excuse for getting lost." The others agreed. "It's very picturesque too - quite stunning" added her friend Kathy McGuinness, "and one of the nicest things is that the paths aren't eroded at all."

The trail begins in Bantry's bustling Wolfe Tone Square, named after the United Irishman Theobald Wolfe Tone who, in December 1796, sailed into Bantry Bay with an armada of French warships in a bid to overthrow English rule. He was defeated, not by the English, but by the bad weather and communications that prevented his force from landing. The weather may still be fickle, but come in late spring or autumn to see the peninsula at its best.

On the outskirts of town we pottered through the azalea-fringed paths around Bantry House, before climbing up onto the backbone of the peninsula. Experienced walkers will revel in this ridge, where for five miles we tramped over rocky, heather-clad moorland, waved on by fluffy white flags of cotton-grass bending in the breeze. To right and left the views are dominated by the long Atlantic inlets of Bantry and Dunmanus Bays; this may not be an island paradise, but it certainly feels like one.

Leaving the ridge at Gortnakilly for a brief spell on the road, we kept a rendezvous with the legendary Irish hunter Finn MacCool. At 345 metres, Seefin - 'Finn's seat' - is the highest mountain on the peninsula. In its shadow, I rested on the beautifully carved bench of Kilkenny limestone unveiled by Irish President Mary Robinson when she opened the Sheep's Head Way in July 1996. A couple of miles across the peninsula, we had a rendezvous of a different kind; local seafood and thick slabs of roast Irish beef were waiting for us in the dining room of the Bay View pub at Kilcrohane. Later, locals and visitors mingled happily as Jane Dixon's impromptu band thumped out traditional Irish music from a cramped corner by the door. Heads ducked, and pints of Murphys' were passed carefully from hand to hand - it was easier than trying to get to the bar. Simon Rees, one of a group of twenty-somethings from Southampton who were touring the area on foot and by bike, summed it all up; "No-one in Hollywood could ever build a set as Irish as this".

Kilcrohane lies on the gentler, southern side of the peninsula, inhabited since prehistoric times. Here the Sheep's Head Way winds through low-lying farmsteads and country lanes, where fuchsias and foxgloves grow wild in the hedgebanks. Here, too, the map suggests half-a-dozen circular routes where less confident walkers can easily explore the stone circles, romantic ruins and holy wells dotted around the landscape.

But for me, the high point of the walk was the six-mile stretch of rugged cliff-tops from the roofless houses of deserted Crimea village (pronounced Cri-may) to the tiny white-painted lighthouse at Muntervary - the Sheep's Head itself. Sea pinks decorate this wild Atlantic coastline, and distant hills float serenely in the cobalt-blue waters of the bay. I was sitting in the evening sunshine at this, the westernmost point of the peninsula, when my companion Tom Waghorn - a veteran of expeditions to Nepal and Pakistan - flopped down next to me on the springy turf. "This has been the most enjoyable day's walk I've ever had in my life," he declared.

Who was I to disagree?

© David Foster 1997