By the spring of 1921, the Irish War of Independence had been grinding on for two years. The IRA was waging a guerrilla campaign against British rule; the British were responding with reprisals carried out by the Royal Irish Constabulary, the regular army, and a force of British war veterans called the Black and Tans whose tactics had drawn international condemnation. The Tans had besieged Tralee for a week in November 1920, blocking all food into the town and shooting three civilians. By early 1921, the RIC inspector for Kerry was confident that the IRA had lost the popular imagination and that his police could travel anywhere they pleased. He was wrong. In February, an IRA organiser named Andrew Cooney arrived from Dublin and formed a 'flying column' - a mobile guerrilla unit. On 5 March, his men ambushed a British convoy at Clonbanin, killing several soldiers including a brigadier-general. Two weeks later, they planned to do it again.

The intelligence reached the Kerry No. 2 Brigade on the morning of 21 March: British troops were coming back by train from Kenmare to Tralee, and because there was no direct route, they would have to change trains at Headford Junction. Dan Allman, in joint command with Tom McEllistrim, gathered thirty volunteers and moved to the junction. They arrived twelve minutes before the train. The railway staff had just enough warning to flee. The platform was empty except for the IRA, hidden in cover, when the engine came in carrying around thirty soldiers of the 1st Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers along with civilian passengers - farmers returning from the Kenmare cattle and pig market. Most of those farmers were already off the train. Some weren't.

Allman approached one Fusilier on the platform and tried to disarm him. The soldier resisted. Allman shot him. That was the signal. From cover, the IRA opened fire on the carriage doors as more soldiers began to disembark. Lieutenant C.E. Adams, who held the Distinguished Conduct Medal from the First World War, was killed at his carriage door. So were several other men standing in front of the engine. The surviving British soldiers returned fire from inside the train; some scrambled underneath the carriages for cover. Dan Allman moved to the end of the platform, knelt to fire on the men under the train, and was shot in the heart. Volunteer Jimmy Baily was killed throwing a grenade beneath the carriages. The fight continued at twenty yards' range - close enough to see faces - for the better part of an hour. The IRA had no clear field of fire on the soldiers crouched under the train; the soldiers had nowhere to go. Three civilians who had not finished moving away from the train were caught in the crossfire and killed. A father and daughter were also seriously wounded. They had been at a market.

McEllistrim, now in command after Allman's death, called on the Fusiliers under the train to surrender. They refused. The IRA began moving in to clear the carriages with grenades. Then a second train pulled into the junction carrying another party of British troops. The flying column had nearly exhausted its ammunition. McEllistrim ordered a withdrawal, and the IRA retreated south into the hills, taking their wounded with them. In the immediate aftermath, McEllistrim summarily executed a man his column had captured and accused of being a spy - a small, ugly footnote on an already ugly day. The British Army's official report listed nine soldiers dead and twelve wounded; an IRA participant later remembered that 'twelve coffins left Killarney later and that wasn't all.' The discrepancy between official and informal counts is a feature of guerrilla wars.

Lieutenant Cyril Egerton Adams, DCM, age 27, of the Royal Fusiliers, killed at Headford Junction. The eight other Fusiliers, mostly working-class men who had survived the First World War and were now soldiers of an occupation army a few months from being withdrawn. Dan Allman, IRA Vice-Commandant, killed leading his column. Jimmy Baily, IRA Volunteer, killed throwing a grenade. The three civilians - their names are not recorded in standard accounts - farmers caught between guns they had no part in firing. The father and daughter, badly wounded, who had come to Headford from a market. The suspected spy, executed afterwards. The war that produced this morning had its causes and its justifications on both sides; the people killed at this junction had families and trades and reasons for being on the train that had nothing to do with the war. Headford Junction railway station is no longer in regular service. The platform where the bodies fell is now a quiet siding in a quiet stretch of Kerry countryside.

Three months after Headford, in July 1921, a truce was declared. By December, the Anglo-Irish Treaty was signed, giving the south of Ireland dominion status. Within a year, the Treaty's terms had split the IRA itself into pro- and anti-Treaty factions and the Civil War began - a war that brought a different kind of atrocity to Kerry, including the Ballyseedy massacre of March 1923, in which Free State soldiers blew up nine Republican prisoners with a landmine just north of here. Headford Ambush sits in the middle of this sequence as one of the larger engagements of the Kerry campaign, and one of the most ambiguous. It was a tactical IRA success and a propaganda complication: the civilian dead were Irish, the soldiers killed were ordinary men, and the firefight had unfolded among farmers carrying parcels from a market. The plaque at the site lists names. People still visit. The trains stopped running here decades ago, but the place keeps its memory.