A song that won’t settle
The Wild Colonial Boy
The ballad goes: "There was a wild colonial boy, Jack Duggan was his name. He was born and raised in Ireland, in a place called Castlemaine." It is one of the great Irish-Australian songs — sung in The Quiet Man, recorded by The Pogues with The Dubliners, top of the Australian charts in Dr. Hook's hands in 1981. The trouble is the name. Most folklorists think the original bushranger was Jack Donahue, killed by police in 1830, and that Duggan, Doolan and Dolan are later substitutions. There is also a Castlemaine in Victoria, gold-rush country, which has its own claim. The Kerry village has decided not to argue. The statue went up in 2019 in the centre of the village. Stand by it for thirty seconds and someone will tell you the song is theirs.
A 13-month siege
The Castle of Maine
The Geraldines built the original castle in 1215 on a bridge over the River Maine — a fortified crossing point marking the southern edge of the Earls of Desmond's territory. By the 1570s it was an English Crown fortress. In 1598 the Irish put it under a thirteen-month siege during the Nine Years' War; the garrison eventually surrendered, the castle changed hands, and Sir George Carew took ownership in 1599. Cromwell's army demolished what was left in 1652. Today there is a fragment by the bridge and a name on every map within fifty kilometres.
A protected estuary
The harbour
Castlemaine Harbour is not really in the village — it stretches west from the bridge for ten kilometres or more, ending at Inch on one side and Cromane on the other. It is a Ramsar wetland, a Special Area of Conservation, and a Special Protection Area, all at once. Light-bellied Brent geese overwinter here in their thousands. Oystercatchers and sanderlings work the mudflats. One of Ireland's four largest seagrass beds is somewhere underneath. The endangered natterjack toad lives in the dunes. Most people drive over the bridge and never look down.
Ryan’s Daughter country
The road to Inch
Twelve kilometres west of the village, the R561 drops you onto Inch Strand — a sand spit five kilometres long sticking out into Dingle Bay. David Lean filmed Ryan's Daughter here in 1969, half-built a village on the dunes, and left half of it for the wind to take back. The strand is one of the great Kerry beaches: flat, hard sand, surf at the end, a chowder shack at the entrance. Most people who come to Castlemaine are really on their way to Inch, and that is fair enough.