The Iveragh peninsula is one of our most glorious and beloved landscapes, and a new book puts the whole area into a geological, historical and social context
THE PEOPLE OF the Iveragh peninsula are lucky. That would be the part of Ireland more commonly known as the Ring of Kerry, where huge vistas flood the horizon at every turn of the road. The Iveragh residents are not only fortunate because they live in a beautiful place: they’re additionally lucky to have a superb new book to consult about the place where they live.
The Iveragh Peninsula: A Cultural Atlas of the Ring of Kerrywas three years in the making and has 52 contributors, ranging from historians and archaeologists to mountaineers, poets and sports journalists. Edited by John Crowley and John Sheehan, the book examines the peninsula from a number of perspectives. There are as many layers within it as strata in the Kerry stone – history, geography, social history, culture, folklore.
“When one looks around, one sees a continuously moving picture not just of the present but of our past.” That sentence, from Brendan O’Sullivan’s chapter on contemporary change and planning in the Iveragh peninsula, could be applied to the book as a whole.
The Iveragh peninsula occupies the area that lies south of Killarney, roughly flanked by Killorglin and Kenmare. It's a 140,000-hectare area that incorporates some of the country's most famous lakes, mountains, and coastline, and one of Ireland's two Unesco World Heritage sites, the Skelligs. One of the reasons Cork University Press decided to put considerable resources into the book is that the area receives so many visitors. Even if you don't live there, you're likely to have spent time in this part of the world, thus they are rightly hoping The Iveragh Peninsulawill appeal to a wide audience.
It all starts with geology. Only discovered in 1992, the footprints of tetrapods (four-legged vertebrates) on Valentia Island are the world’s oldest reliably dated evidence of amphibians walking on land, which is pretty thrilling. The photograph in the book looks a little as if a goat has been trotting across freshly washed sand; neat little regular prints. They’re actually stone tracks, 150 of them discovered in sandstone by a Swiss geology student when he was mapping the northeast coast of Valentia Island. The tracks would have been made by a creature that, according to the accompanying artist’s impression, looks a little like a crocodile with a large paddle-shaped tail. The creature would have lumbered across an ancient flood plain, resting its large tail every now and then. Afterwards, the fresh tracks were covered and preserved by a fine sand, brought there by floods. The area is now the country’s only geological National Heritage Area.
Elsewhere, mountaineer Dermot Somers writes a personal essay about his knowledge of the mountains he has been climbing all his life. To Somers, Broaghnabinnia “is a sturdy thug of a mountain. There is no easy or elegant way up or down.” Archaeologist Tomás Ó Carragáin writes about mountain pilgrimages, and holy places of the peninsula and poet Paddy Bushe takes as his subject landscape, myth and imagination. He looks at place names in the Amergin poem, several of which are in and around the Waterville area, including a sea-rock still known locally as Carraig Éanna. “Two houses and one beauty salon in Waterville are named after it,” Bushes writes. “It is not certain whether their owners are aware of the name’s provenance, but its continued use is some sort of testament to the enduring power of the myth.”
Several chapters use maps to focus on and highlight a particular subject. Thus, in archaeologist Frank Coyne’s piece on rock art, there is a useful accompanying map that gives locations of the approximately 120 sites on the peninsula. There are also wonderful photographs illustrating several of these sites, showing concentric circles carved into stone with dramatic backgrounds, empty of any sign of human habitation.
Looking at a series of maps has a cumulative effect. You get to read the layers of history as you turn the pages. For example, in the same luscious pieces of land that so many tourists now throng to, such as Kenmare town, there was once a workhouse. During the Famine, there were so many people seeking refuge in it that in 1847 the medical officer there described the place as “an engine for producing disease and death”. The Kenmare workhouse, built to shelter 500, is now a private residence.
The Great Famine map reveals how Iveragh, more vulnerable than other places in Ireland due to its remoteness and high population density, struggled to cope. On the maps, you can see where workhouses, relief committees and coastguard stations that provided relief were located, and where the temporary hospitals were set up. In the same chapter, there is a map depicting the dramatic population changes within the decade 1841-1851.
In a county that had many landlords, times may have changed, but many of the original planted gardens still thrive, such as the 2,000-acre estate of Derreen, which gets its own chapter.
Prior to the Famine, butter production was prevalent on the peninsula, one of the side-products of the famous Kerry cow. Made on local farms, the butter was carried to the Cork butter market in firkins along a series of mountain tracks. The butter sold there made its way all over the world. Colin Sage and Flicka Small, authors of a chapter on the food culture of the Iveragh peninsula, recount that Iveragh butter “ended up being consumed everywhere from the colonial plantations of the West Indies to the pioneer settlements of Australia”. Many of the existing green lanes of rural Kerry, some of which are now part of the Kerry Way, are still known locally as the “butter roads”.
Remoteness is relative. Iveragh may be a long way from some parts of Ireland, but it’s the closest point to Newfoundland. Hence, Valentia was the location of the first successful transatlantic cable link. The American financier Cyrus Field, whose idea it was to lay a transatlantic cable, had it sealed with a substance called gutta-percha, a waterproof organic substance that came from Malaysia. In Denis Linehan’s chapter on the telegraph cables, he recounts that when the underwater cable was successfully laid, enterprising hawkers in New York sold earrings made of gutta-percha and breast-pins of little pieces of cable wire.
Iveragh’s dramatic landscapes have inspired generations of people to try and capture it in different ways. Mary Butler, who died in 1934 aged 83, was a member of a local landlord family. In 1910, she replied to a public appeal from Bertram Windle, then president of UCC, who was looking for people in Munster to record the locations of antiquities in their area. He did not have much success, but from Mary Butler he did get 19 careful watercolours of archaeological monuments on the peninsula, some of which are reproduced in the book. The originals are all now held in UCC, along with the accompanying letters she wrote to Windle. Among the many other visual artists who have interpreted the landscape, and whose images are included here, are Jack B Yeats, Paul Henry, Pauline Bewick, and, latterly, the painters who have worked at Cill Rialaig.
You may not be able to eat the Iveragh scenery, as the expression goes, but if you’re considering tackling the Tour de France, you might be interested to find out what the winner of the 1958 Rás Tailteann, Mick Murphy, ate while training for the challenging 1,494km race. GAA correspondent Michael Foley, in his chapter on the sporting heritage of the peninsula, records that Cahirciveen-born Murphy retreated to the Nadd mountain prior to the race. While there, “he subsisted on grated carrot, raw eggs, turnips, potatoes, honey, juice extracted from the stems of nettles, goat’s milk and cow’s blood”.
The Iveragh Peninsula: A Cultural Atlas of the Ring of Kerry
, edited by John Crowley and John Sheehan, is published by Cork University Press at €59
