Qualla: Ard na Caithne

Ard na Caithne: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dáibhí Ó Bruadair, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Norse named it for butter. They sailed past in raiding ships and saw a sheltered bay on the Kerry coast where the dairy was rich, the cattle plentiful, and the harbour deep enough to land a longboat. Smoer wick. Butter harbour. Smerwick. But the Irish-speakers who actually lived here had their own name, and theirs is older and gentler: Ard na Caithne, the height of the strawberry tree, after the arbutus that once grew on the slopes above the shore. Both names describe the same place. Only one of them holds the memory of the massacre that took place at the foot of those slopes in November 1580 - and only one of them connects, by way of a Cromwellian execution and a poet who became a folk hero, to a Kerry that never quite stopped resisting.

Read more: Ard na Caithne on Qualla

Image: Dáibhí Ó Bruadair | CC BY-SA 4.0

Ard na Caithne: The Height of the Strawberry Tree

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dáibhí Ó Bruadair, CC BY-SA 4.0. Ard na Caithne sits at the foot of An Triur Deirfear, the Three Sisters, and within the shadow of Mount Brandon. It is one of the principal bays of Corca Dhuibhne - the Kerry Gaeltacht - bounded by the villages of Baile an Fheirtearaigh, Baile na nGall, and Ard na Caithne itself....

Read more: Ard na Caithne on Qualla

Image: Dáibhí Ó Bruadair | CC BY-SA 4.0

Ard na Caithne: The Geraldine Landing

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Oliver Dixon, CC BY-SA 2.0. In July 1579, James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald - cousin of the Earl of Desmond, Catholic, exiled by Elizabethan rule - landed in Smerwick Harbour with a small force of Spanish and Italian mercenaries. He had spent years in Continental Europe gathering support, papal banners, and the ...

Read more: Ard na Caithne on Qualla

Image: Oliver Dixon | CC BY-SA 2.0

Ard na Caithne: The Massacre at Dun an Oir

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Aidannnuigalway, CC BY-SA 4.0. In September 1580, a second papal force of about 600 Italians and Spaniards landed at Smerwick under the command of Sebastiano di San Giuseppe, and dug in at a small earthen fort called Dun an Oir - the Fort of Gold - on the headland above the harbour. They held out for ten days ...

Read more: Ard na Caithne on Qualla

Image: Aidannnuigalway | CC BY-SA 4.0

Ard na Caithne: Frobisher's Return

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dáibhí Ó Bruadair, CC BY-SA 4.0. The harbour holds a quieter history too. In 1578, two years before the massacre, the English explorer Sir Martin Frobisher made landfall at Smerwick on his return from his third Arctic expedition. Frobisher had spent the previous summer in what is now Baffin Island, in Canadian A...

Read more: Ard na Caithne on Qualla

Image: Dáibhí Ó Bruadair | CC BY-SA 4.0

Ard na Caithne: The Poet of Ferriter's Castle

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ingo Mehling, CC BY-SA 3.0. Up the slope from the harbour, the remains of Caislean an Fheirtearaigh - Ferriter's Castle - stand against the green hillside. In the seventeenth century the castle was the home of Piaras Feiritear, an Irish-language bard and chief of his Norman-Irish clan. Feiritear is one of t...

Read more: Ard na Caithne on Qualla

Image: Ingo Mehling | CC BY-SA 3.0