Five centuries at Lixnaw
The FitzMaurice Earls
The FitzMaurices arrived with the Normans and stuck. By 1320 the third baron had built the castle and bridge at Lixnaw. The line ran for twenty-one barons before Thomas, the 21st Lord, was made Earl of Kerry in 1723. Four earls later, the title was extinct and the seat was a ruin. Their most famous descendant — through the female line — was William Petty FitzMaurice, 2nd Earl of Shelburne, who became prime minister of Britain in 1782 and negotiated the peace that recognised American independence. Lixnaw produced him; Lixnaw never saw him.
How a great house was abandoned
The Old Court
The FitzMaurices' main residence at Lixnaw — the Old Court, sometimes called Lixnaw House — was a substantial 17th- and 18th-century seat with formal gardens, a deer park and an ornamental lake. The 3rd Earl inherited young, lived in Dublin and on the continent, and the place was let go. By the 1780s it was derelict. After his death in 1818 the title went extinct and there was no one left to care. Today only a few outer walls survive in the fields on the edge of the village. It's one of the more haunting noble-seat ruins in Munster precisely because so little remains — you have to stand in it and imagine the rest.
Lixnaw GAA
A hurling village in a football county
The club was founded in 1888 — among the first wave after the GAA itself in 1884 — as the 'Erin's Hope' branch of the local parish. Hurling took root and never let go. Nine Kerry Senior Hurling Championships sit on the board: 1933, 1954, 1983, 1985, 1999, 2005, 2007, 2014 and 2018. Notable players include Maurice Fitzmaurice (1891 All-Ireland final), the modern hurler Shane Conway, and the dual footballer Paul Galvin, who played football for Finuge and Kerry. The grounds at Páirc na Díthreibhe — Hermitage Park — opened in 1982 on the banks of the Brick.
Lixnaw station, 1880–1963
The line to Limerick
Lixnaw station opened on 20 December 1880 on the new Limerick and Kerry Railway, the line that ran from Tralee through Abbeydorney, Lixnaw, Listowel, Abbeyfeale and Newcastle West to Limerick. For the best part of a century it was how you got to and from the village. Passengers stopped on 4 February 1963; freight kept going up to Listowel until 1977; the last goods train ran in 1983. The track is gone. The North Kerry Greenway project would put a walking and cycling route on the old line — slowly, parish by parish.