Built 1800, fell silent, fell down, came back
The windmill
Sir Rowland Blennerhassett put the mill up in 1800 to grind corn for export through his own pier. It worked for sixty years and then the canal killed the trade and it slowly went derelict — sails gone by the early twentieth century, roof gone soon after. By the 1970s it was a roofless shell. Tralee Urban District Council bought it in 1981, restoration began in 1984, and Charles Haughey opened it again in 1990. It is now the largest working windmill in Ireland or Britain — five storeys, four sails, twenty-one metres of stone — and it grinds wheat into flour that you can buy at the door.
Sixteen voyages, not a passenger lost
The Jeanie Johnston
Between 1848 and 1855 the Jeanie Johnston sailed sixteen times from Blennerville pier to North America — Quebec on the first crossing, then Baltimore and New York. The voyage averaged forty-seven days. The ship was small, the holds were full, and other coffin ships were burying a fifth of their passengers at sea. Not the Jeanie Johnston. Captain James Attridge refused to overload her, and Dr Richard Blennerhassett — Sir Rowland's relative — sailed as ship's doctor on every crossing. Between them they got more than two thousand people across the Atlantic alive. The replica you see in Dublin's Custom House Quay was built in Blennerville and Tralee in the late 1990s.
How a port lost its harbour
The ship canal
The Tralee Ship Canal opened in 1846 — three kilometres of cut from the bay into a basin in Tralee itself. It was meant to free Tralee from depending on Blennerville's tidal pier. It did. Within twenty years the village's harbour was finished as a working port, even as the famine emigration was still pouring through it. The canal in turn was finished as a working waterway by the early twentieth century — silting, the railway, and the bigger ships at Fenit ended it. The lock gates and the towpath are still there. The canal is a walk now.
The mountains behind the village
The Slieve Mish
The hills that rise straight out of Blennerville's southern edge are the Slieve Mish — Sliabh Mis, the mountains of the goddess Mis. The Lebor Gabála, the medieval Irish book of invasions, has the Milesians landing at the foot of them and fighting the first battle for Ireland on the slope. Whether or not anyone landed, the mountains are real and they are walked: a long ridge running west toward Camp, with Caherconree fort on a spur halfway along. From the windmill car park you are looking straight up at them.