We went on a family holiday to Valentia Island to search for 300 million-year-old dinosaur tracks

Some 385 million years ago, a small four-legged creature waddled out of the ocean and onto the shore at Valentia Island off the coast of Kerry. It had a bit of a wander about, meandering around the place leaving footprints and tail marks in the silt. The prints it left were then fossilised, and remained undiscovered until the 1990s.

The prints record an incredible moment in the history of our species, as they are both evidence of our ancestors’ first tentative journeys onto land, but also the very first recorded instance of someone going on holiday in Kerry.

The tetrapod, as the four-legged vertebrate is known, was really a visionary, as he wouldn’t have known about the Wild Atlantic Way and most likely wouldn’t have been able to look up Kerry on Tripadvisor and was purely taking a punt on a break in the Kingdom, but in doing so started a trend that continues to this day.

If you want a break away, Kerry is the spot: the vertebrates knew it, the invertebrates knew it, and now my kids know it, too. I think we can all understand where the tetrapod was coming from (emotionally, as opposed to the ocean): you’re there in your humdrum world, things are a bit monotonous and boring, every day feels the same now as in the Devonian period, you’re just treading water, trying to feed yourself and your offspring and avoid getting eaten by an armoured placoderm.

Sometimes you just need to decompress and I would imagine our little pal probably felt the same quiet exhilaration that I do driving over the mountains and dropping down into Killarney when he clambered out of the ocean onto Valentia and loudly exhaled all the stress, strain, and mostly likely, seawater.

I found myself staring at his little footprints last week and thinking about how despite the 400 million years between us, really we aren’t all that different — just two organisms, trying to navigate the wilds of Kerry but scared to stop and ask for directions in case we seem like soft, shell-less urbanites.

I was also starting to wonder if maybe I had oversold the tracks to the kids, as I had been talking them up using mentions of dinosaurs and Jurassic Park, despite the fact that the kids hadn’t watched any of those films in years and the Jurassic period itself took place a couple of hundred million years after Lil’ Tetri went exploring Valentia.

I had only brought the younger two children with us, as the 21-yearold and 16-year-old had heard they might have to learn about what evolutions is and so declined the invite, preferring to stay at home and descend into a Lord Of The Flies-esque feral state.

The middle son, who didn’t get a choice, had already had to deal with the disappointment of discovering that we were going on holiday in Valentia in Kerry and not Valencia in Spain which he had heard had a great waterpark, but I tried to console him by telling him what better waterpark is there than the cruel, bitter waters of the Atlantic?

‘My wife thought the track marks would be bigger. Story of her life, it would seem’

Even my wife was somewhat deflated about the track marks, pointedly stating that she thought it would be bigger. Story of her life, it would seem. Apparently she had been led to believe that we would be standing in some sort of Godzilla-size footprint rather than looking at some little dints in rock and shouting at each other over the crashing waves and roaring winds.

I’m not sure where I slipped up in my management of their expectations; I really felt like the tetrapod tracks were the highlight of a trip that had already featured a visit to a slate quarry, a lighthouse, and the highest point on Valentia Island which mercifully is completely accessible by car and where we got panoramic views of thick, wet fog.

But the youngest child was enraptured by the tracks, and spent some time after we had all drifted off just standing there staring at them. Somehow I didn’t expect a nine-year-old to be so awed by four hundred million years of human evolution, but kids will always surprise you, especially ones whose grasp of evolution has mostly been shaped by watching Pokemon.

After we came home he kept talking about them and how he couldn’t wait to get into school to tell his friends about this great place he discovered called Valentia, in much the same way a little four-legged creature had done millions of years ago.