A three-foot-gauge with a temper
The Tralee and Dingle Light Railway
The line opened on the 31st of March 1891 and connected Tralee to Dingle by way of Camp, with a branch north from Camp Junction to Castlegregory. Three foot gauge — narrow even by Irish narrow-gauge standards — and a route that climbed straight onto the side of Slieve Mish at gradients steep enough to give the locomotives serious trouble. Passenger services ran until 1939; the famous monthly cattle trains from Dingle Fair to Tralee held on until June 1953. The track was lifted soon after. If you walk west out of Camp on the south side of the road you can still pick out the alignment in the field walls, and the stone abutments of the Glenagalt bridge are still standing where the trains used to cross.
The Camp tragedy
The Curraduff disaster, 22 May 1893
Two years into the railway's life a cattle special ran away coming down the gradient toward the village. The locomotive, the brake van and the trucks behind it were carrying farmers and pigs to Tralee fair. The driver lost control on the descent into the Finglas valley, the train derailed on the sharp curve above the viaduct at Curraduff, hit the parapet and dropped into the river. Three engine men were killed; thirteen passengers and crew were injured. A second train coming behind from Dingle was flagged down by the guard, Thomas O'Leary, who ran ahead waving a lamp; otherwise the death toll would have been worse. The Board of Trade held a four-day inquiry in Tralee Court House the following month. The viaduct was rebuilt; the line ran for another sixty years. Locally the day is still called the Camp tragedy.
A well that tested positive for lithium
Gleann na nGealt — the Valley of the Mad
South of Camp, in the valley running down toward the bay, sits Tobar na nGealt — the Well of the Mad. The folklore is old and well-documented: for centuries people brought relatives suffering from what we would now call mental illness to drink the spring water and eat the watercress around it, and the cures were said to be real. The earliest written references go back to the sixteenth century. In the 2010s a chemist tested the water and found it carried 55.6 parts per billion of lithium — a lot, by any measure, and lithium is what we treat bipolar disorder with today. The well is small and unfussy. There is no visitor centre, no ticket. The road in is narrow.
A stone fort high on the mountain
Caherconree and Cú Roí
Two-thirds of the way up the western flank of Caherconree, the second-highest peak in the Slieve Mish, there is a promontory fort — a natural ledge defended on the fourth side by a stone wall. The mountain is named for it: Cathair Conraoi, Cú Roí's Stone Fort. The legend goes that Cú Roí mac Dáire kept the woman Bláthnaid up there against her will, that she signalled her lover Cú Chulainn by pouring milk into the river running down the mountain, and that Cú Chulainn followed the white river up and killed Cú Roí in his own fort. You can walk up to the fort from the south side. It is a serious hill day in poor weather.