Christmas Eve, 1601
The Battle of Kinsale
Don Juan del Águila landed 4,000 Spanish troops on October 2nd 1601 to open a Catholic front against Elizabethan England. Hugh O'Neill marched his Ulster army the length of Ireland in winter to meet them. Mountjoy's English forces dug in between. On Christmas Eve the Irish attacked at dawn and were routed inside an hour — 1,200 dead, 800 wounded, the Spanish trapped behind Kinsale's walls. Six years later the Earls fled. Gaelic Ireland's political independence ended in a field outside this town, and the town has been quietly aware of it ever since.
May 7th, 1915
The Lusitania
U-20 fired one torpedo at 2:10pm, eleven nautical miles south of the Old Head. The Lusitania sank in eighteen minutes. 1,193 dead, 30 nationalities, including 128 Americans — a number that helped pull the United States into the war two years later. The bodies came ashore at Kinsale; the inquest was held in the courthouse. The signal tower above the cliffs has been a museum since 2015. The 'Wave' sculpture in the memorial garden was unveiled in 2017.
Castle Bar, until the sixties
The Spaniard's name
The pub up in Scilly was built around 1650 on the foundations of an old castle and was called the Castle Bar for three centuries. The Coleman family ran it. In the 1960s they renamed it for Don Juan del Águila — three hundred and sixty years late, but the gesture stuck. The Cornish sailors who gave Scilly its name had been and gone in the meantime.
A Tidy Towns idea
The painted houses
The pink-and-yellow-and-green frontages on Pearse Street and Main Street are the town's signature now and were not always there. The colour scheme came in through the Tidy Towns competition in the 1980s and 90s — paint your shopfront, brighten the street, win the gong. Kinsale won the National Tidy Towns title in 1986. The colours stayed. Every shopkeeper still picks their own; the planning office gently suggests they don't all pick orange.