Berehaven was a Royal Navy port for the better part of two centuries. In 1885 the warship HMS Polyphemus, an experimental torpedo ram, ran a simulated attack on a fleet anchored off the town - a test of new weaponry on the calm water that British admirals trusted as much as they trusted any anchorage in the empire. After Irish independence, the harbour and its gun batteries on Bere Island remained one of the three Treaty Ports retained by Britain. The Royal Navy did not finally hand back the keys until 29 September 1938, when the Anglo-Irish Trade Agreement ceded Berehaven to the new state. The golf course east of town is laid out on the old base; the sentry boxes still stand at the gates, and the tennis court covers ground where oil tanks once held fuel for the fleet.

Wolfe Tone Square in the middle of town has more stories than its size suggests. The plaque to the Berehaven Battalion remembers the men and women who fought for the Irish Republic between 1916 and 1923, and the granite statue at the east end commemorates Timothy Harrington, the Parnellite MP and Lord Mayor of Dublin who died in 1910. The writer Standish James O'Grady, son of the Church of Ireland clergyman, was born here in the Glebe House and grew up to revive the old Irish heroic cycles in print for a Victorian readership. At Furious Pier on 14 May 1921, four soldiers of the King's Own Scottish Borderers - Privates Hunter, McCullen, Edwards and Chalmers - were shot dead by IRA men led by Michael Og O'Sullivan. The town has carried its history without flinching.

On the square stands MacCarthy's, which Pete McCarthy put on the cover of his 1998 book and which the McCarthy family has kept open since 1860. Grocery in the front, pub at the back, and behind the counter on a wooden mount, the ceremonial sword presented to Air Commodore Aidan MacCarthy by a Japanese officer at the end of the Second World War. MacCarthy survived Dunkirk, a torpedoed ship, internment as a prisoner of war, and the Nagasaki bomb - he was inside the city when it fell - before coming home to write A Doctor's War. Two of his daughters live in Castletownbere still. One ran a restaurant; the other runs the pub. The Japanese officer's family asked, decades later, for the sword to be returned. The MacCarthys declined.

The harbour was much used by smugglers up to the nineteenth century - any deep-water anchorage out of sight of revenue cutters was, in those years, an asset. Today, fishing remains the chief economic engine, employing around four-fifths of working people in the area as of the early 2010s. Bord Iascaigh Mhara runs the national Fisheries Training School from the town. The population is small - eight hundred and sixty in the 2016 census in the town itself, with about forty-two hundred across the broader Beara Peninsula - and since the 1960s a steady trickle of incomers from Britain and the continent has added new accents to the mix in the square. Just east of town, Waterfall House has passed through Dutch supermarket owners, an elevator-company heir, and the girlfriend of filmmaker Neil Jordan, each leaving their mark on the gardens.

Behind Castletownbere, the Caha Mountains roll up to Hungry Hill, the highest peak on the peninsula. Daphne du Maurier set her 1943 novel here, naming it for the mountain and tracing the rise and fall of a copper-mining dynasty across the page in lightly fictionalised parallel with the real Puxley family of nearby Allihies. The book became a film. The mountain looks unaffected. Beara is a place where the names accumulate without much erasing: a MacCarthy castle that lent the town its Irish name, a Wolfe Tone who never made it ashore in 1796 because of the gales, an O'Sullivan Beare whose stand at Dunboy was finally commemorated by a plaque in 2002, and a working fishing fleet that still goes out before dawn.