This is a landscape that has been rearranged twice: once by ice and sea, and once by people leaving.
Castlegregory is Caisleán Ghriaire, the castle of Griaire, and Griaire is the Irish form of the Norman name Gregory. The Placenames Database attributes it to Gréaghaire de hÓra, Gregory Hoare, a local chieftain and Desmond tenant who built a stronghold here in the sixteenth century, at the south-east of the village on what became Castle Lane. The anglicised name is on record from 1584.
The castle passed to the Husseys, who held it by 1601. Walter Hussey defended it during the Cromwellian conquest around 1649, was overwhelmed, and withdrew to Minard, where the garrison was blown up. The building still stood in the mid-eighteenth century; by 1841 not a trace remained. What survives is a handful of carved stones, reassembled as a gateway in a garden behind a shop in the village: two arched limestone doorway sections, punch-dressed door jambs, a keel-moulded sandstone block older than the castle itself, and one stone with a contracted inscription nobody has read.
There is a famous story attached to Gregory Hoare, involving a court case, a paralysing rage, a bridal procession, a son called Black Hugh and a stabbing over emptied wine kegs. Treat it as literature. One Dingle Peninsula heritage source states flatly that a tragic romantic and completely fictitious story was invented about the castle in the 1850s, and the internal dates do not hold together.
The Maharees is a tombolo: a bar of sand that tied a group of former offshore islands to the mainland and, in doing so, separated Brandon Bay from Tralee Bay. It runs about five kilometres north into the Atlantic. The dunes on top of it are not scenery, they are the structure, and they are moving: the system has retreated more than forty metres in recent decades, and the single access road is buried by blown sand often enough that the county council has had to clear the same stretch a dozen times in a winter.
Behind the spit, Lough Gill is a natural sedimentary lagoon, only slightly brackish, roughly two and a half kilometres by eight hundred metres and averaging barely a foot deep, fed by the Stradbally and Killiney rivers with a sluice controlling the outflow to Tralee Bay. The mountain behind, Mount Brandon, is Old Red Sandstone, and the Geological Survey identifies these as the oldest Devonian rocks in Ireland. The corrie and paternoster lakes strung up its flanks, Pedlar's Lake among them, are the work of ice.
Out in the Maharees archipelago, the group known as the Seven Hogs, the largest island is Illauntannig, Oileán tSeanaigh, the island of Seanach. Tradition makes Seanach a brother of St Senán, or in another telling of St Brendan; neither is securely established, and the founding date is given variously as the fifth, sixth or seventh century. The site was in use into the twelfth.
Inside a drystone cashel there are two small oratories, one of them boat-shaped, three roofless beehive huts, three stone-faced leachta with quartz pebbles, a burial ground, two bullaun stones, a cross nearly two metres high, cross slabs and a shell midden. A bell from the site, dated between 600 and 900, is in the National Museum. It is National Monument number 67, and it is reached by boat and by weather.
Mount Brandon, Cnoc Bréanainn, is 952 metres and takes its name from St Brendan the Navigator, born near Tralee about 484 among the Altraige, the clan of Tralee Bay. He is said to have built cells at the foot of the mountain. The scholarly position is that very little secure information about his life survives and that there is no reliable evidence he reached the Americas; the Navigatio that made him famous was written down centuries after he died. Scholars also disagree over whether the mountain is named for Brendan at all or for the older figure of Bran.
What is certain is that people have been climbing it for a very long time. The summit holds the remains of Séipéilín Bréanainn, Brendan's oratory, and archaeologist Barry Raftery identified walls on the eastern summit as an inland promontory fort. Lewis recorded the oratory and a fine spring in 1837, and noted that the summit is rarely seen unclouded. The pilgrim road, Cosán na Naomh, runs eighteen kilometres from Ventry Strand to the foot of the mountain.
Lewis also recorded, in 1837, that in Cloghane parish a patron was held on the last Sunday in July in honour of St Brendan. It is still held. Locally it is Domhnach Chrom Dubh, Crom Dubh's Sunday, one of the two great Lughnasa hill pilgrimages in Ireland along with Croagh Patrick. Máire MacNeill's The Festival of Lughnasa records the Bishop of Kerry being carried to the summit in a súgán chair to say Mass before some twenty thousand pilgrims in the 1860s, and the disorder afterwards being such that he banned the pilgrimage. The village festival was revived in 1995 as Féile Lúghnasa. A carved stone head of Crom Dubh was set into the wall of the medieval church at Cloghane until it was stolen in 1993.
Before the Famine this was a crowded coast. Lewis gives Cloghane parish 2,772 people in 1837, with about 250 employed seasonally in a fishery worked from yawls and canoes, and butter going out to Limerick in hookers. Over eighty per cent of local people lived in mud cabins or one-room huts. In September 1846 the potato crop came in ninety per cent down. By February 1847 the local doctor was recording deaths from starvation by name, and two Quaker observers found more than a hundred and twenty cases of fever and dysentery at the dispensary and the dead lying in cabins in the glens.
Kerry's population fell from 295,000 in 1841 to 160,000 by 1911. This parish emptied westward: in one study of Irish emigrant bank accounts in New York between 1850 and 1860, twenty-two of the thirty-five Kerry depositors came from Castlegregory and its immediate vicinity.
From 1891 the Tralee and Dingle Light Railway ran a three-foot gauge line fifty-one kilometres over the hills to Dingle, and a ten-kilometre branch came down from Castlegregory Junction into Castlegregory itself. The branch closed to passengers in April 1939, the main line in 1953. The route is still legible in the landscape if you know where to look, and the old station houses in the village carry the name.
The north coast had its own battalion. The Military Service Pensions Collection records the 4th Battalion of the 1st (Kerry) Brigade as exactly this stretch of coast: A Company at Cloghane and Cappa, B at Ballinira and Kilcummin, C at Aughacasla, D at Kilshannig and Fahamore, E at Camp and F at Castlegregory. It numbered 434 all ranks in July 1921.
The brigade activity reports list an operation against the RIC barracks at Camp on 19 February 1920, though the record gives no account of what happened there. The nearest major action was the Lispole ambush on the far side of the peninsula in March 1921, in which the Kerry No. 1 Brigade flying column, including men from Castlegregory, engaged Black and Tans out of Dingle.
Where sources disagree, this page says so. The Gregory Hoare legend, the identity of St Seanach and the origin of the mountain's name are all contested; the local history and archaeology sources are linked from Plan Your Visit.