The only hexagonal base in Ireland
Kinneigh Round Tower
Five kilometres north-west of the villages, on a rocky outcrop, stands a round tower around 26 metres tall. What makes it singular is the bottom six metres: they are hexagonal, six flat faces, before the mason turns the structure circular for the rest of its height. Of roughly sixty surviving round towers in Ireland, this is the only one built on a hexagonal base, and the join between the two shapes is clean enough that it was clearly the work of someone who knew exactly what he was doing. The monastery here was founded in 619 AD by St Mocholmóg, sacked by the Vikings in 916, and the tower itself is usually dated to around the eleventh or twelfth century. It is free to visit, it sits beside a small parish church and graveyard, and you can walk right up to it. Bring it the respect it deserves and you will likely have it to yourself.
Ten arches over the Bandon
Ballineen Bridge
Fighin Owen McCarthy built the bridge across the Bandon in the 1740s, and the village took its name from it - Béal Átha Fhinín, the mouth of Fighin's ford. Of the twenty-nine bridges that cross the Bandon River, this one, with its ten arches and a narrow nineteen-foot carriageway, is the one people single out as the handsomest. It is not a monument and there is no plaque making a fuss. It is just a working road bridge over a good river, which is rather the point.
November 1920
The flying column and the confessions
The Kilmichael Ambush - where Tom Barry and the West Cork Flying Column wiped out an Auxiliary patrol on 28 November 1920 - took place in the hills to the north, near Kilmichael village. Ballineen sits in its immediate orbit. In the days before the ambush Barry moved his men closer to Ballineen and Enniskeane for cover, and on the night of 27 November the column made their confessions to Canon O'Connell, the parish priest of Ballineen, before going out to the road. Barry was a Cork man raised in Rosscarbery who had fought as a British soldier in Mesopotamia before turning his training on the Crown forces; the discipline that made Kilmichael work was learned in one army and used against another. The ambush site itself is up at Kilmichael - a road and a memorial - and the story is what gives it weight.
A nationalist out of a Big House
Kilcascan and the Daunts
Kilcascan Castle, west of Ballineen, was built around 1760 by the Daunt family. The notable Daunt was William O'Neill Daunt (1807-1894), who became a prominent Irish nationalist and served for a time as secretary to Daniel O'Connell - a Protestant landed family producing a Catholic-emancipation campaigner, which was less rare in nineteenth-century Ireland than the tidy version of history suggests. The house is private. The connection is the interesting part.