From Malin Head to Mizen Head: Hilary Fannin drives by car from Cork to Schull.
'Welcome to Cork, a nuclear-free zone," the sign reads - which is good news, as inside the car my three-year-old, Jakey, is behaving like a chemical reactor. Snoop Dogg is blasting from the speakers as we negotiate the one-way system.
"Do you know the bells of Shandon?" we ask a bemused resident (you hum it, son, I'll play it). I like Cork. For a brief period in the early 1980s I came to live here, just as everyone else was leaving. I'm beginning to think I should have stayed. Twenty-five years later and the European Capital of Culture is looking prosperous and confident.
My favourite part of Cork city, though, is up here under "the bells", where once, on New Year's Eve, while merrily clinging on to some scaffolding, I slit my cornea on a rusty nail. Here the streets are dusty and shambolic, slouching towards the river like an uninvited guest.
Jakey has fallen asleep, and we head west. The Kinsale road is good, and we arrive before he wakes. "Kinsale, best-kept town in Ireland," reads the sign. Armed with the facts, we disembark. Beautiful slate-grey buildings; yellow, pink and blue houses leaning towards each other on narrow streets; terse-looking women with long brown legs and multiple marriages haughtily steering their s through groups of lumpy tourists, who stand outside the restaurant windows reading the menus, trying to decide whether it's worth remortgaging to pay for a bowl of seafood chowder.
For a mere €1 million or so, you too could have a waterfront property and some canine cred. There are an awful lot of estate agents in Kinsale: the shifting population of people who think they want to live in this alluring-looking town, but who up sticks and leave again after a year or two to try the Dordogne or Tuscany, keeps them all in business.
We have hit Kinsale at the start of arts week, and we soon happen upon some entertainment. There is a small stage on a square in the centre of town, populated by men and women from the Democratic Republic of Congo. They are dressed in bright green kaftans, they have percussion and brass, and when they eventually get the sound system working and start to sing, they blow the clouds away.
Jakey takes his T-shirt off and dances around the square; he is less than elegant. Swaying among the Congolese singers a young white woman, also dressed in a kaftan, sings solo (Jakey assumes that the other ladies have forgotten the words). Her name is Ellen Dillon; the gospel choir, she tells me, is called Elikya. The musicians are Limerick-based and they sing in Lingala ("elikya" translates as "hope").
Ellen introduces me to Alphonsine Masaba, a demure and soft-spoken Congolese woman. "I love Limerick," she tells me before returning to the stage to fill the square with music.
In Summercove, just outside town as you head for Charles Fort and the Old Head of Kinsale, we have butternut squash soup in The Bulman - the best pub in Kinsale in my not wholly inexperienced view.
Peter, who is almost nine, makes friends with the first in a series of wet spaniels that will "dog" our trip. This one, who is called Sally, is stick-obsessed, which can happen if you're a spaniel.
As we head past the decorative Virgin Mary in Ballinspittle on the road to Clonakilty, the car is suddenly buried in familiar sheaves of west Cork rain.
Clonakilty is very tidy; it has been Tidy Towns runner-up or winner for the last 28,000 years. This market town is also beautiful, colourful and essential, even when the hanging baskets are battered by rain. You can buy school shoes and stuffed olives and any number of epicurean delights without buying a parking disc, and you can enjoy them in Emmet Square (under an umbrella), a magnificent Georgian square now home to a statue of Michael Collins, who doubtless wouldn't have recognised a jar of tahini if it had jumped up and bitten him on the bottom.
The drive from Clonakilty to Baltimore, via Glandore, Union Hall and a completely unnecessary and unplanned diversion to Tragumna (someone thought it sounded interesting; I thought it sounded like a regrettable infection), is littered with fuchsia, montbretia and foxglove, pretty paintbox houses and a muscular, defining sea.
Baltimore, where we stay that night, is the end of that particular road, another pretty but rapidly expanding town, where you can take the boat to Cape Clear and Sherkin (if you do, take a picnic and try to avoid abseiling down the mountain with a buggy to catch the last ferry back).
It is difficult to find a room, and though everyone I'd spoken to previously reported a quieter season than usual, Baltimore is buzzing. The hotel where we get a booking is fine, functional, anonymous and good value. It offers a family room where children sleep for free.
"Leisure centre!" Peter reads from the back of the car. Terrific. When you're travelling with children, leisure centre actually means baggy-eyed doggy-paddling around the children's pool at dawn in deeply unflattering swimming caps.
We eat that evening in a child-friendly cafe overlooking the harbour, La Jolie Brise, where everybody is very young and you can't open a menu without falling over a wistful-looking French teenager. The food is good and reasonably priced and it revives two exhausted children, who almost immediately find another wet spaniel. This one doesn't introduce itself, eschewing the offer of a stick and offering a dead crab as a plaything.
Baltimore was sacked in 1631 by a bunch of North African pirates, who killed two Irishmen and carried off about 100 English settlers as slaves. The weapon needed by the unfortunate settlers to repel such a vicious attack was light years beyond their reach: it's called karaoke. We stumble past some on the way back to our hotel room that night, and it's a toss-up which is worse - a lifetime of indentured slavery or the dentured savagery of The Wind Beneath My Wings.
Leaving Baltimore the next morning in some tentative sunlight, we take the road to Ballydehob, which takes us past Lough Hyne. We roll down the misty hill, past purple and blue hydrangeas and great big creamy cows. Lough Hyne is Ireland's only marine nature reserve, an inland saline lake, connected to the sea by rapids, which house more than 1,000 species. We look for green sea slugs and red-mouthed gobys and find instead a giant crab claw and an elegant couple in their bathing suits, rhythmically swimming along the lake shore.
The lardy horror of our city life hits us like a ton of bricks as we chat to the couple. "We live locally," they offer, "and try to swim in the lough every day between May and October." The water is tempting, but having conveniently forgotten to bring a towel, we move on.
Skibbereen ("Keep it Clean, it's Skibbereen!" - this is a hygiene-obsessed county) is a big town, with roundabouts and plastic ice-cream cones and hints of how things must have looked before we started squeezing cars that are marginally bigger than Monaco down streets designed for donkeys. "Baker's confections," reads the fading mural, obstinately staring down the march of German supermarkets.
Skibbereen houses a good art gallery, the Gate Gallery, representing local painters. Nine out of 10 west Cork residents, if not painters or ceramicists, are reiki healers, vegetarian guesthouse proprietors or Indian head masseuses (that, by the way, is a completely fictitious statistic).
The dull road out of Skib, which will bring us to Schull, takes us through Ballydehob (or Hobbeldybob, as my father used to call it). Hobbeldybob is a welcoming town, which retains much of the character of west Cork and happily has resisted over-earnest hygiene pronouncements to go with its place-name.
Ballydehob is home to sisters Nell and Julia Levi, both now of advanced years, who run a bar-cum-grocery shop in the main street that has remained largely unchanged since it was established in 1924. Levi's is an extraordinary place - bar on one side, grocery on the other, memorabilia on the walls. Sooner or later someone will slap a heritage certificate across the front door and we will view the interior with a simultaneous-translation tape on our heads and an entrance ticket in our back pocket.
For now, however, you can buy a pint and enjoy the sisters' company without a guidebook, and (if you are lucky enough to get a booking) Annie's restaurant across the road will bring you over the menu and take your order while you're finishing it.
The sisters have courteously received thousands of visitors over the years. Given the recent ban and an occasional but persistent yearning for nicotine, I sit smoking in the sisters' kitchen with Julia, who was born in the house, helped into the world by an aunt who lived until she was 107.
We talk about the past, when the stoic town endured economic hardship and emigration and the shop sold everything except shoes, including cloth by the yard, long johns, whalebone corsets, and sides of beef and ham that hung from hooks on the ceiling.
While Julia referees a game of football between Peter and Jakey in the bar and 80 years of history threaten to come crashing down on top of us, local bookseller Jack Connell tells us how there used be a snug for the women, visible from the back door, where farmers, holding the reins of their carts on the way home from the creamery, assessed the eligibility of the contents and Julia's mother acted as matchmaker.
Reluctantly we leave, and with the car looking like a caravan and the detritus of Jakey's appalling eating habits scattered over the back seat lowering the tone of the cleanest county in Ireland, we start the final leg of our journey.
Approaching Schull, it's hard not to feel that this previously bewitching place is slowly being consumed by development. The town clearly revels in its determined opulence and efficiently offers everything from open crab sandwiches to salsa dancing classes.
Despite this, the crooked little charity shop still looks like it stepped out of a nursery rhyme; it makes the holiday homes that prevail seem as incongruous as suited executives standing in a rock pool.
It's too far to go home now; we are at the edge of the world.
