November 1580, across the bay
The Smerwick Massacre
Six hundred soldiers — mostly Italian, some Spanish, some Irish — landed at Smerwick in September 1580 to support the Second Desmond Rebellion against Elizabeth I. They dug into Dún an Óir, an Iron Age promontory fort on the south side of the harbour. Lord Grey de Wilton arrived with an army and three days of cannon. Their commander, Sebastiano di San Giuseppe, surrendered. Grey hanged the officers, took the rest out in pairs, and had them put to the sword. Walter Raleigh and his cousin captained the killing parties. Edmund Spenser, the poet of The Faerie Queene, was Grey's secretary and watched the whole thing. The fort is a grass mound now, on the headland you can see clearly from Ballydavid pier. There is a small monument. Most people drive past it.
2km up the road
Gallarus Oratory
Two kilometres east of the village, in a small field off the back road to Dingle, stands the most perfect dry-stone church in Europe. Gallarus Oratory is built of cut sandstone with no mortar on the outside, shaped like an upturned boat, and it has been standing watertight for somewhere between eight hundred and twelve hundred years — the scholars argue. The interior is dark, low, four metres by three. There is one tiny round window in the east wall. Walk in, stand still for a minute, and the village outside stops mattering for a bit. Free to visit. The visitor centre next door wants a fiver for a film. Skip the film.
Why the road signs are Irish-only
The Gaeltacht voice
Ballydavid sits in the Corca Dhuibhne Gaeltacht — one of the few places in Ireland where Irish is still the working language of the home. RTÉ Raidió na Gaeltachta broadcasts from a studio outside the village. The local primary school teaches through Irish. The Gaeltacht boundary was redrawn in 1956 and again in 1974, and Baile na nGall stayed inside both times because the language stayed. If you have a few words — even a 'go raibh maith agat' — use them. If you don't, an honest 'sorry, I haven't got the Irish' goes further than pretending.
Where the pilgrim path comes through
Saint Brendan's road
Mount Brandon is named for Saint Brendan the Navigator, the sixth-century Kerry monk who supposedly sailed to America in a leather boat thirteen hundred years before anyone else thought of it. The summit was a Christian pilgrimage site by the early medieval period and probably a pre-Christian one before that. Cosán na Naomh — the Saint's Road — runs eighteen kilometres from Ventry to the foot of Mount Brandon and passes within sight of Ballydavid. You can walk a section from the village past Gallarus Oratory and on toward the mountain. People have been doing it for fifteen hundred years.