Daniel O'Connell, born 1775
The Liberator
He was born at Carhan House just outside Cahirciveen and raised in Derrynane down the coast. He became the lawyer and politician who won Catholic Emancipation in 1829 - the first peaceful mass political movement in Europe, half a century before anyone else managed it. The Memorial Church on Main Street, finished in 1902, is one of the only Catholic churches in the world named for a layman. The town has not let go of him, and there is no reason it should.
Burnt 1922, restored 1990s
The Old Barracks
The Royal Irish Constabulary built their county headquarters here in the 1870s, in a turreted German schloss style that has never quite made sense on a Kerry headland. The story goes that the plans were swapped with a barracks meant for the North-West Frontier of India. Anti-Treaty forces burnt it in 1922 during the Civil War. It stood as a roofless shell for seventy years. The town restored it as a heritage centre in the 1990s and it is now the museum it should have been all along.
Castle ruin and stone fort
Ballycarbery and Leacanabuaile
Three kilometres west of the town the road runs out at Ballycarbery Castle - a fifteenth-century McCarthy Mór tower house, now a roofless ruin standing in a field above the bay. Walk the lane uphill from there and you reach Leacanabuaile, a stone ringfort from somewhere around the ninth century, with the original chamber and souterrain still walkable. Both are unticketed, unsupervised, and entirely the better for it. Bring boots.