With its many health benefits and curative properties, fresh coastal air refreshes your respiratory organs, revitalises your senses, and invigorates your mind & body.
Daily stresses caused by an unpleasant environment can cause you to feel anxious, or sad, or helpless. This in turn affects your body’s normal functioning, muscle tension and suppresses your immune system. A pleasing environment reverses that.
Being in nature can reduce the ill effects of stress and increases pleasant feelings. Exposure to nature not only makes you feel better emotionally, but it also contributes to your physical wellbeing, reducing blood pressure, heart rate, muscle tension, and the production of stress hormones.
Not only does nature helps us cope with pain but as we are naturally drawn to trees, plants, water, and other natural elements, we are absorbed by nature’s scenes and distracted from our pain and discomfort.
Loop Head is the home to natural beaches, wildflowers and wildlife in abundance.
Sixty-metre cliffs at the edge of the peninsula support colonies of guillemots and kittiwakes. The headland near the lighthouse is the end of major flyways of birds migrating south for the winter from North America, Greenland, Iceland and the Arctic. Over-wintering barnacle geese from Greenland, cormorants, great black-backed gulls and storm petrels add to the mix.
The Bridges of Ross, internationally renowned as one of Europe’s top sea-watching sites, is a birder’s paradise for studying the migration of passing seabirds and spotting vagrant stragglers from North America. Shearwaters, skuas, petrels and rarities like Sabine gulls have been recorded here. Wildfowl and waders from Northern Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Siberia and Scandinavia invade the mudflats of the Shannon estuary every winter. Poulnasherry Bay is a good place to spot them.
