The Irish name of the village, An Fhaiche Mhor, means simply 'the big green' - a reference to the open commons that once defined the settlement. Fahamore sits at the tip of the Maharees peninsula, the sandy spit that juts north between Brandon Bay and Tralee Bay on the Dingle Peninsula. The village proper is barely a village - a townland of about fifty houses scattered between dunes, a single pub, a fishing pier on the west side of Scraggane Bay. The 2011 census recorded a population of 122 in the townland; forty-seven houses occupied, forty-four vacant. In 1946 the village had eighty-four houses and three hundred and eighty-four people, mostly working family farms with no hired labour, growing potatoes, carrots, onions, and beetroot in the sandy soil, using seaweed for fertiliser. The population has thinned by more than half in three generations. The fields are still farmed.

Local oral history holds that the worst storm in living memory was the Night of the Big Wind in January 1839 - a hurricane that struck Ireland on the night of Epiphany and was, for nearly a century, the benchmark for catastrophe. The wind tore roofs off houses, drowned cattle, levelled ricks. In Fahamore the storm is remembered in the names elders pass down - the gables that came down, the boats lost. Half a century later, in 1890, the three-masted sailing ship Charger, carrying a cargo of timber from the Baltic, was wrecked at Carralougha just offshore. The remains of her boilers are still visible on the rocks at low tide. The coast keeps its wrecks the way other places keep churches - as touchstones, as warnings, as evidence.

Fahamore's pier on Scraggane Bay supports about twenty half-decked and decked fishing boats in the seven-to-fifteen-metre range. The catch is the catch you would expect on a western Atlantic coast: European lobster, spiny lobster, spider crab, edible crab, Atlantic salmon. Fishing methods are traditional - pots and tangle nets for shellfish, monofilament drift nets for salmon. Live shellfish are held in moored wooden storeboxes in Scraggane Bay until they are loaded onto vivier trucks for export to Spain and France, where most of the Kerry lobster catch is eaten. The fish pond at Kilshanig, originally built to store lobsters, is now an abalone farm. The economy is small but real. Twenty boats and a dozen vivier trucks tie this tiny village to restaurant tables in San Sebastian and Brittany.

The currach is a wooden-framed boat covered with canvas or tarred cloth - light enough for two men to lift, narrow enough to slip between rocks, seaworthy enough to handle Atlantic swell. Variants of the design go back at least three thousand years. The naomhog, the larger Kerry variant, was the standard fishing boat of west Munster well into the twentieth century. Fahamore is one of a small number of places where currachs are still built and used - as working boats at the fishing pier, as tenders for trawlers, and as racing boats. The July regatta draws teams from Galway, Clare, and across Kerry to compete in the All-Ireland Currach racing series. The boats are fast. They cut through chop. Watching them race is watching something old being kept current, not by museum effort but by use.

The intertidal zone around Fahamore is rich. Lugworms leave their casts in the sand at low tide; local anglers dig them for bass bait. Kelp and several wracks - bladder, serrated - drape the rocks. Dilisc, sea lettuce, carrageen moss. The seabirds include gulls, shags, cormorants, gannets. Curlews probe the strand. Swallows arrive in summer. Seals haul out on the offshore rocks; dolphins are sometimes seen in the bay. A nineteenth-century sea wall was built to slow coastal erosion; it failed and now lies in pieces twenty metres back from the cliff edge. In the 1990s, Kerry County Council placed rock armour along two kilometres of coast to protect the road and the houses. The Atlantic keeps testing the defences. So far, mostly, they hold.