Carrigafoyle, March 1580
Pelham's siege
Carrigafoyle was the O'Connor Kerry stronghold and the strongest castle in Munster when the Second Desmond Rebellion went up. Sir William Pelham, the English Lord Justice, brought a fleet of ships up the Shannon at the end of March 1580 and laid cannon against the seaward wall. Three days of bombardment broke it open on Easter Sunday. The garrison — about seventy men, Irish, Italian and Spanish, under a Captain Julian — were mostly cut down in the breach or hanged afterwards. The castle never recovered. The breach is still in the wall, six storeys up. Stand under it and the scale of what happened lands.
Buried 1580, found 1871
The Lislaughtin Cross
When word came that the English raiders were on their way, the Franciscans at Lislaughtin Friary buried their great silver-gilt processional cross in the ground for safekeeping. The friary was sacked, three friars were killed at the altar, and the cross stayed lost for two hundred and ninety-one years. A man digging in a field outside the village turned it up in 1871. It is fifteenth-century work, made for the friary by the O'Connor Kerry chiefs in 1479, and it is now in the National Museum in Dublin. The friary it was made for is still standing in ruins down the road.
The poet from the square
Brendan Kennelly
Brendan Kennelly grew up in a pub on the village square, went to Trinity in 1953, and stayed there teaching English literature for nearly half a century. He published over thirty books — Cromwell, The Book of Judas, The Man Made of Rain — and became the public face of Irish poetry on television and radio for two generations. He came home often. He died in October 2021 and is buried in the churchyard at Lislaughtin. The headstone is unfussy. He would have wanted that.
Five kilometres up the road
The Tarbert ferry
Five kilometres north of the village the road runs into the Shannon at Tarbert, where a car ferry crosses to Killimer in Clare every hour on the half-hour, every day of the year except Christmas. Twenty minutes across. It saves you a hundred-and-thirty-seven-kilometre drive round through Limerick, and it puts the cliffs at Loop Head and the Wild Atlantic Way of west Clare an hour up the road. The ferry has been running since 1969. Most people who pass through Ballylongford are on their way to it.