Baronies were imposed on Ireland after the Norman invasion of the late 12th century, as a way of slicing the conquered country into administrative pieces below the level of the county. Each barony was used for the administration of justice and the raising of revenue. In many cases, a barony corresponded to an earlier Gaelic tuath, a small kingdom or tribal territory that had submitted to the Crown, so the new lines often followed older ones. By the late 19th century, baronies had been overtaken by more modern local government units and were formally retired in 1898. They never fully disappeared. Land registrations, planning permissions, and historical references still cite them. To say that a property is in the barony of Bear is to fix it on the map with a precision that the county alone cannot give.

Six places give Bear its inhabited shape. Castletownbere, the largest, sits on the south side of the peninsula on Bantry Bay and remains one of Ireland's busiest fishing ports. Allihies, on the western tip, was a 19th-century copper-mining village where Cornish miners came to work and a small museum now tells the story. Eyeries, on the north coast, is famous for the brightness of its painted houses. Ardgroom sits just east of Eyeries on the Kenmare River side. Adrigole and Glengarriff lie at the eastern end where the peninsula joins the mainland, with Glengarriff also the gateway to Garnish Island and its sub-tropical gardens. Rerrin sits on Bere Island, off Castletownbere. The barony reaches around the entire northern shore of the peninsula and back along the southern coast as far as Adrigole, then bends inland to Glengarriff.

The land inside the barony is dramatic. Hungry Hill, at 685 metres, is the highest peak on the Beara peninsula, immortalised by Daphne du Maurier in her 1943 novel of the same name; her family had a connection to the Puxley copper-mining dynasty whose story is partly woven into the book. Dursey Island lies at the very western tip, reached only by a cable car, the only one of its kind in Ireland, which crosses Dursey Sound. Bere Island, just off Castletownbere in Bantry Bay, was a British military base until the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1938; the abandoned fortifications are still visible. Garnish Island, off Glengarriff, has the famous Italian gardens laid out by Annan Bryce and Harold Peto in the early 20th century. The civil parishes inside the barony are Kilcatherine, Killaconenagh, Kilnamanagh, and part of Kilcaskan.

Walk the Beara Way, the long-distance footpath that loops around the peninsula, and the old barony boundary is invisible underfoot. But the route still passes between the barony of Bear and the barony of Glanarought when it crosses from Cork into Kerry near the Healy Pass. The barony's only inland neighbour is Bantry, to the east. To the north it is bounded by the Kenmare River, the long sea inlet that separates Beara from Iveragh. Most people walking through the landscape never think about administrative geography. But the lines drawn after the Normans came, eight hundred years ago, still describe two thirds of one of Ireland's most beautiful peninsulas, and they describe it more precisely than any newer scheme has managed.