Nine arches, no trains
The Lispole Viaduct
The Tralee and Dingle Light Railway opened in 1891, a three-foot narrow-gauge line that crawled the 50 kilometres from Tralee to Dingle in about three hours when it was running well. To get over the Owenalondrig river east of Lispole, the engineers built a nine-arch rubble-stone viaduct, finished in 1890. The line was hard work — steep gradients, sharp curves, livestock on the track — and it lost money for most of its existence. Passenger services stopped in 1939, goods in 1947, the line closed for good on 1 July 1953. The rails were lifted, the stations decayed, and the engines were scrapped or sold. The viaduct, being too solid to demolish cheaply, was left where it stood. It is still there: nine stone arches, a flat top where the track ran, ivy in the joints, sheep underneath. You can walk to it from the village in fifteen minutes and stand under an arch and listen to nothing.
The teacher from Kinard
Thomas Ashe
Thomas Ashe was born at Kinard, a townland a couple of kilometres south of Lispole, in 1885. He trained as a national school teacher, joined the Gaelic League, and through it the Irish Republican Brotherhood. In Easter Week 1916 he commanded the Fingal Battalion of the Volunteers and led the only Volunteer victory of the Rising at the Battle of Ashbourne in north County Dublin. He was sentenced to death, commuted to penal servitude, released in the 1917 amnesty. Re-arrested that September for a seditious speech, he went on hunger strike in Mountjoy, was force-fed, and died from the procedure on 25 September 1917. He was 32. His funeral in Dublin drew tens of thousands. There's a small memorial at his birthplace at Kinard, signposted off the road south of the village.
The boats made of canvas and tar
Currach builders
The currach — the Irish skin-boat, ribs of light timber covered in tarred canvas, narrow as a knife — was the working boat of the West Kerry coast right through the twentieth century. Lispole had currach-building families, the craft handed son-to-son: the frame steamed and bent, the canvas stretched and stitched, the whole thing painted black with pitch and Stockholm tar. The Blasket men rowed currachs out to fish and to ferry; the Dunquin men still race them. There are fewer builders now than there were, and most of the boats on the peninsula come out of a few sheds. Ask in the pub if anyone is still at it; you may get an answer, or you may get a look.
The quiet beach below the village
Lispole Strand
There's a small strand at the foot of the village, reached by a narrow lane that drops off the N86. It's not a destination beach — no car park to speak of, no lifeguard, no chipper — and that is exactly the point. A short curve of sand and shingle, a stream coming out of the hill, the Atlantic stretching south to nothing. The locals walk dogs here. On a calm summer evening you may have it to yourself. In a westerly with the tide running, leave it alone.