Ninety-eight dead, fifty yards from shore
The Edmond
On 19 November 1850, a three-masted barque called the Edmond sailed from Limerick with 216 passengers and crew bound for North America. A winter storm drove her into Kilkee Bay in the dark. She struck rocks less than fifty metres from the beach. By the time the tide turned and the ship broke apart, 98 people were dead. A local property owner named Richard Russell used the fallen mast as a gangway and got roughly a hundred ashore. The survivors were put up in the town overnight. Fifty-four bodies were buried in Kilfiera graveyard. A commemorative plaque marks Edmond Point today.
Four and a half hours late, and he still played
Percy French and the train
In August 1896, the entertainer and songwriter Percy French was booked to perform in Kilkee. The West Clare Railway delivered him four and a half hours late. He sued the company at the Ennis Quarter Sessions and won £10 plus expenses. The railway appealed; the appeal failed. French, not a man to waste an experience, wrote 'Are Ye Right There Michael?' — a song mocking the railway's spectacular indifference to timetables. The song ran for the rest of the century. The railway closed in 1961. The song is still going.
Four Tivoli Cups and a bronze statue
Richard Harris and the mallet
Richard Harris was a Limerick man, but he spent enough summers in Kilkee to win the Tivoli Cup — a racquetball competition played against the high sandstone walls of the West End — four consecutive years from 1948 to 1951. The Tivoli Cup was first competed for in 1935. Harris's record stands. In 2006, Russell Crowe flew in to unveil a life-size bronze statue of Harris at eighteen, mallet raised, outside on the seafront. It is a stranger monument than it sounds.
The Duggerna Reef and the Pollock Holes
The reef nobody sees
The reason Kilkee has a beach at all is the Duggerna Reef — a shelf of rock running across the mouth of the bay that breaks the Atlantic swell before it arrives. Inside the reef, the water is calm enough for swimming in conditions that would be dangerous a mile up the coast. The Pollock Holes, natural rock pools along the reef, have been used as bathing places for two centuries. They also serve as shallow water for trainee divers before they go out to the sea arches and underwater caves that make Kilkee one of the better diving sites on the west coast.