The first thing to say is that this one was difficult. Because where to start with County Kerry? And where to stop? You could write a book on its places, people, stories, myths and legends — and many people have. Type “County Kerry” into the online store named after a big river and you get over 100 books. Type “Kerry Ireland” and you get 300 more.
County Kerry, simply put, is a place unequalled. It is known throughout Ireland, and much further afield, simply as “The Kingdom”. Nicknames like that must always be earned. County Kerry has earned it over and over and over again.
So we could have chosen dozens and dozens of things for this round-up tour of the county. I settled on seven. Without further ado, let’s get started.
Still Blooming: The Rose of Tralee
No whistlestop tour of Kerry would be complete without the “Rose of Tralee”, and who are we to overlook the festival that has become such an enduring global symbol of Irish pride, unity and identity?
The festival has its origins in a song, and the song, like many songs, has its origins in love and scandal.
The lyrics to the 19th century ballad “The Rose of Tralee” are generally credited to the English writer Edward Mordaunt Spencer and the music to the English composer Charles William Glover, but shusssh … whisper it … it wouldn’t be the first time the English took something Irish without asking, would it?
To get to the bottom of it, a number of years ago the Rose of Tralee festival organizing committee engaged a forensic linguist, Dr Andrea Nini of the University of Manchester, to do a bit of sleuthing.
Dr Nini’s research found evidence that after William Pembroke Mulchinock, the son of a wealthy local merchant family, sent one of his poems, “Smile, Mary My Darling”, to English composer Stephen Ralph Glover, the English lads liked the sound of it so much they took it for themselves.
Without permission, Mordaunt Spencer, an associate of Glover, adapted it to become “The Rose of Tralee” with help from the composer brothers Stephen Ralph and Charles William Glover to set it to music.
As for the Rose of Tralee International Festival itself, it has been going strong since its foundation in 1959. Unlike other female pageants around the world which might be described as “beauty contests”, the Rose of Tralee winners are women who best match the song’s attributes of “lovely and fair”. The winning Roses are all deemed to have an exceptional personality that makes them great role models both for the festival and as an unofficial ambassador for Ireland for the following 12 months and beyond.
As of 2024, “Roses” from Dublin and New York are vying for top honours, with five wins apiece. Showcasing the Rose of Tralee festival’s global appeal, winners in its 60-plus year history have also come from London, Birmingham, Chicago, Boston, Miami, Pennsylvania, Texas, Philadelphia, Toronto, France, Italy, Luxembourg, Perth, Queensland and New Zealand.
Dingle: A Home of Ancient Mysteries and Modern Vibrancy
Dingle, or Corca Dhuibhne in Gaelic — pronounced “Curka Duvna” — is truly a place that stands apart in a county that stands apart.
Discounting the many offshore islands, Dingle is home to the westernmost point on the Irish mainland, Dunmore Head. While the town of Dingle is a haven for tourists, blow-in residents and locals who count their lineage for countless generations, it is also part of a broader unique ecosystem — the Dingle peninsula is more than two hundred square miles in area.
The peninsula is home to Mount Brandon, Ireland’s eighth tallest mountain, and the Conor Pass, the highest mountain pass in the country.
The Gallarus Oratory, a stone church dating back to the 6th century, stands as an iconic, albeit silent, witness to almost two millennia of faith and perseverance, whether backed by religious fervour or not.
Gallarus Oratory. Image via Wikimedia Commons
Off the coast of the Dingle peninsula, the nearby Blasket Islands, once home to a thriving Gaelic-speaking community before being depopulated in the 1930s, offer a window into Ireland’s past. Despite a tiny population even when it was inhabited, the Great Blasket Island has produced an impressive literary heritage. Tomás Ó Criomhthain, author of “The Islandman”, and the works of Peig Sayers (pronounced simply “Peg”) are well known to generations of people from all over Ireland — Peig’s writing was a staple of the Irish school curriculum for decades.
Read our Islands of Ireland article here!
As the Dingle peninsula has both north- and south-facing coastlines, beachgoers and surfers alike can generally find a safe and sheltered place for relaxation or exertion, although the weather can change fast. As they’re known to say all around Ireland’s west coast, the beloved terrain marketed successfully in recent years as the Wild Atlantic Way, “if you don’t like the weather, stick around for 20 minutes!”
The Liberator of Derrynane
Moving south, the next peninsula to jut its way into the Atlantic is the Iveragh Peninsula, and it is on the southern edge here where you’ll find Derrynane House.
Derrynane is the ancestral home of Daniel O’Connell, the 19th century politician and campaigner remembered for his tireless campaign for Catholic emancipation in Ireland.
Daniel O’Connell. Image via Britannica
More than a century before Mahatma Gandhi achieved astonishing liberation with pacifist means in India, Daniel O’Connell was doing something similar for Irish Catholics, securing freedoms for the local majority that were unprecedented under the Protestant powerbase that had developed after the occupation of Ireland by the English.
O’Connell’s aversion to violence was said to have been influenced by his experiences in France in his youth, when he was sent to the English Jesuit college of Saint-Omer in the north of the country and his time there coincided with the bloody aftermath and upheaval of the French Revolution.
Derrynane House still stands and welcomes visitors, its estate of pristine gardens and tranquil views of the Atlantic serving as a museum and memorial that showcases the life of the man forever known as “The Liberator”.
Befitting his status in Irish history, when Irish independence from Britain came about more than 70 years after his death, O’Connell had major streets in the centre of Dublin and Limerick cities renamed to commemorate him.
Valentia Slate Quarry’s Unique History
Valentia, a small island off the coast, is home to one of Europe’s most historic quarries. Valentia Slate, renowned for producing some of the finest slate in the world, is the oldest quarry in production in Ireland having first opened as far back as 1816, more than a century before independence.
Slate from Valentia has been used in renowned buildings such as the Houses of Parliament in London and the Palais Garnier in Paris.
Valentia Slate also played a part in one of the most phenomenal projects in the history of communications — the Transatlantic Cable Project of the 1850s.
The company behind the project rented a building in the Valentia Slate yard in Knightstown, where William Thompson, later Lord Kelvin, worked on the so-called “mirror galvanometer”, a device with which he could detect signals coming from the Canadian side of the cable. His work contributed to the first ever cable message sent between Europe and North America in August 1858.
Tom Crean: From South Pole to Stout Pour
We return to the Dingle Peninsula for a moment, but this one thoroughly deserves its own few words. Annascaul is a small village a few miles inland from Dingle and it is home to a humble but legendary establishment, a place that can perhaps lay claim to being the most famous pub in a whole country of famous pubs — Tom Crean’s South Pole Inn.
The pub was owned by Crean, who in the early decades of the 20th century became, against all odds, one of the most celebrated of Antarctic explorers.
Photo of Tom Crean taken aboard the Endurance, 1914. Image via Wikimedia Commons
Crean’s adventuring ways started in his mid-teens, when he left home to join the Royal Navy — some say he headed off at 16 years of age after a row with his father, an occurrence which brought many an Irishman quickly to manhood.
He spent eight years in service there before meeting up with Robert Falcon Scott, or “Scott of the Antarctic”, and volunteering to replace a deserter aboard Scott’s Discovery for his first expeditionary voyage which set off in 1901, not returning to London until three years later.
Crean served on three major Antarctic expeditions with world-famous explorers Scott and Ernest Shackleton. He survived harrowing conditions to save fellow crewmates, earning himself the nickname “The Irish Giant” and upon his return to west Kerry — an achievement in itself, given that so many who went to Antarctica never made it back — Crean opened the South Pole Inn, where stories of icy expeditions captivated locals and visitors alike from then till now.
Today, anyone with Kerry roots might perhaps find in Crean’s story echoes of their own ancestors’ perseverance in the face of hardship. The inn these days is adorned with memorabilia from Crean’s expeditions, making it in many ways a living, breathing museum, where every pint of stout poured might carry with hints of adventure, resilience and phenomenal perseverance.
The Skelligs: Monks and Jedis
The peaks of the Great Skellig (also known as Skellig Michael or Sceilig Mhicil in the Gaelic) rise jagged and dramatic from the Atlantic Ocean off the Kerry coast.
The Great Skellig, or Skellig Michael. Image via Discovery Ireland
These islands — Great Skellig and Little Skellig — hold a mystique that spans well over a thousand years. Early Christian monks founded a monastery here as far back as the sixth century, perched impossibly almost 200 feet above sea level on an inhospitable ledge overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. Today, the ancient stone steps rise from the rock jetty to the site of the monastery and its beehive huts.
If you’re seeking solitude and spiritual connection, you’re almost certain to find them here. Solitude is a given, as visiting the island is restricted — only one small boat a day is permitted to land there during the summer months each year. As for spiritual connection, well, if you don’t get that hundreds of feet in the air, on the side of a rock, buffeted by the Atlantic wind and weather, you might not find it anywhere.
In more recent years, this UNESCO World Heritage site gained global renown as a filming location for Star Wars: The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, where it played the part of the secluded refuge of Luke Skywalker.
The Natterjack Toad: A Quirky Kerry Native
Among Kerry’s windswept dunes, if you’re very lucky and very watchful, or most likely both, you might find a small, quirky resident.
While you can find the Common Frog all over Ireland, the Natterjack Toad counts Kerry’s sandy coastal habitats of Dingle and Iveragh amongst its only Irish homelands.
The natterjack, named for the loud and rasping call made by the male of the species each spring’s breeding season, is Ireland’s only native toad species. Slightly more olive-green in colour than the common toad, the natterjack is best distinguished by the yellow stripe that runs down its back.
Its way of getting around is also distinctive. While other toads might move by walking or hopping, the natterjack is often in a hurry, giving it the nickname of “the running toad”.
However, sadly, its prospects are not good. While it can be found in more than a dozen countries around Europe, the natterjack’s numbers have been dropping alarmingly in recent decades.
According to the UK charity The Wildlife Trusts, the natterjack is almost extinct in the UK with just one or two colonies remaining in south-east England and East Anglia. In Ireland the situation is not much brighter, with the National Biodiversity Data Centre classifying the species as endangered and rating its numbers as “bad” and its habitat and future prospects as “inadequate”.
Conclusion
Hopefully we’ve shown you that it’s not for nothing that County Kerry gets its nickname of “The Kingdom”.
And we’ve barely scratched the surface. We could write a whole other article here on the iconic town Killarney, on the gorgeous nearby Muckross House — you can find the beautiful products of Mucros Weavers here.
We could have written about Listowel, with its festival and its Andrew Carnegie Library and the plays of the great John B. Keane, or Killorglin with its Puck Fair, or Carrauntoohill, Ireland’s tallest mountain, or the world-famous golf links of Waterville and Tralee and Ballybunion and Dooks, or perhaps Ireland’s most loved broadcaster, the sports commentary Micheal O Murcheartaigh who died in 2024, or the greatest of all Gaelic footballers, including Jack O’Connell from Valentia, Jack O’Shea, Pat Spillane and Mikey Sheehy to the greatest of the modern generation, David Clifford. (It’s said the first All-Ireland medal is nothing more than a relief for any self-respecting Kerry footballer.)
All of that can wait for a Part 2, or maybe a Part 3. Kerry truly is a place without peers.
