Lios Poil - anglicised as Lispole - sits eight kilometres east of Dingle and forty kilometres west of Tralee, on the National Secondary Route that threads the south side of the peninsula. It is a Gaeltacht village, meaning Irish is the community language, not a heritage display. The road signs read Lios Poil first. Conversations in the few local shops drift between languages without ceremony. The Atlantic is close enough that the weather here is mostly weather coming in off the sea: rain that finds you sideways, light that breaks suddenly through grey to gild a wet field, then closes again. The Slieve Mish mountains rise to the north. The Iveragh Peninsula sits across Dingle Bay to the south. In between, Lispole tends its own small business - a townland of farms, a handful of houses, a church, and the bones of a railway that once tied this coast to the rest of the country.

The Tralee and Dingle Light Railway opened in 1891, a narrow-gauge improvisation built to drag goods and passengers across thirty-one miles of rough peninsula. Lispole station opened on the first of April that year. For nearly half a century it served the village - cattle to market, post and parcels, the occasional astonished tourist - until passenger trains stopped in April 1939, freight stopped in March 1947, and the line finally closed altogether on the first of July 1953. The viaduct survived because dismantling stone is harder than abandoning it. Today it carries footpaths and grazing sheep, and locals tell you the trains used to crawl across it slowly, slowly, as if uncertain whether they would make the other side.

The townland of Kinard, just outside Lispole, produced Thomas Ashe - in Irish, Tomas Aghas - one of the central figures of the Irish revolution. Born in 1885 to a farming family, Ashe taught school, organised the Irish Volunteers, and led the only sustained military victory of the 1916 Rising at the Battle of Ashbourne in County Meath. He was captured, sentenced to death, reprieved, and released. In 1917, arrested again for a seditious speech, he died in Mountjoy Prison after being force-fed during a hunger strike - the first Irish hunger striker to die in custody. He was thirty-two. His funeral in Dublin drew tens of thousands. Michael Collins gave the graveside oration. The road sign for Kinard names him without explanation, because in Lispole no explanation is needed.

Ashe is not the only name Lispole keeps. Joe Higgins, the Socialist Party politician and former Member of the European Parliament, grew up here before making his name as a parliamentary thorn in successive Irish governments. Paudie Fitzgerald, who won the Ras Tailteann cycling race in 1956 and was selected for that year's Melbourne Olympics, was born in the village. And Gregory Peck - the Hollywood actor, the moral spine of Atticus Finch - had Lispole roots through his paternal grandmother Catherine Ashe, a cousin of Thomas. Peck visited often through his life, walking the lanes his ancestors had walked, eating in the same pubs. For a village this small, the roster of departures and returns is improbable. The peninsula has always sent its people out and pulled them back.

Lispole does not advertise itself. The Dingle road draws the tourists west to the town, then on around Slea Head, and most visitors pass through without stopping. Those who do find a place that feels older than its small population suggests - the viaduct, the church, the standing stones in the surrounding fields, the bilingual conversations, the slow weather. The Atlantic is two kilometres south. The mountains are close. The light, when it comes right, makes the wet stone glow.