Qualla: Listowel

Listowel: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY 2.5. From 1888 until 1924, a strange machine rattled the 14 kilometres between Listowel and the seaside resort of Ballybunion. It was a monorail - the world's first commercially operating monorail, in fact - designed by a French engineer named Charles Lartigue, who had reportedly been inspired by watching camels carry double-pannier loads across the Algerian desert. The Lartigue track was an A-frame trestle with a single rail along the top. The locomotives and carriages straddled it like saddle bags, half on either side. Passengers shouted across the central rail at one another. Cattle had to be balanced - one cow on one side, sandbags on the other, or two cows of equivalent weight. It worked for 36 years. Listowel, on the River Feale in north Kerry, is now mostly remembered for other things - its writers, its races, its annual Writers' Week - but the monorail still gets first billing.

Read more: Listowel on Qualla

Image: CC BY 2.5

Listowel: Lios Tuathail

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Photography of life, CC BY-SA 4.0. The name is Lios Tuathail in Irish - Tuathal's ringfort - and the ringfort is presumably buried somewhere beneath the Norman castle that the FitzMaurice family built here in the 13th century. Two of the four towers of Listowel Castle still stand, connected by an unusual arch over...

Read more: Listowel on Qualla

Image: Photography of life | CC BY-SA 4.0

Listowel: The Lartigue

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Flagship1537, CC BY-SA 4.0. Charles Lartigue's monorail solved a real engineering problem. A conventional railway needed flat, stable ground; the bog and soft soil between Listowel and Ballybunion would have required expensive embankments. A monorail on trestles could ride over uneven terrain, with the load...

Read more: Listowel on Qualla

Image: Flagship1537 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Listowel: John B. Keane's Town

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Giacomo Antonio Lombardi, CC BY-SA 4.0. Listowel is John B. Keane's town. The playwright, who died in 2002, kept a pub here on William Street and wrote some of the most performed Irish plays of the 20th century - Sive, The Field, Big Maggie, Sharon's Grave. The Field, about a Kerry farmer's obsessive attachment to a pi...

Read more: Listowel on Qualla

Image: Giacomo Antonio Lombardi | CC BY-SA 4.0

Listowel: The Races and the Pubs

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Joseph Mischyshyn, CC BY-SA 2.0. Listowel Races, held just south of town across the river, have been run since the 19th century. There are two main meetings: the Summer Festival on the May/June bank holiday weekend, and the Harvest Festival in late September. The Harvest Festival is the bigger event, with the Gu...

Read more: Listowel on Qualla

Image: Joseph Mischyshyn | CC BY-SA 2.0

Listowel: Ballybunion and the Cliffs

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Bogman assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 2.5. Twelve kilometres west, on the Atlantic coast, lies Ballybunion - a seaside resort of 1,618 people that swells in summer with surfers, families, and golfers. The town has two beaches separated by the shell of a 16th-century tower-house: Ladies Beach to the north and Men's Beach t...

Read more: Listowel on Qualla

Image: No machine-readable author provided. Bogman assumed (based on copyright claims). | CC BY-SA 2.5

Listowel: Round Tower, Round Trip

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Velela, Public domain. Just southwest of Listowel, at Rattoo, stands Kerry's only intact medieval Round Tower - a 28-metre-tall stone cylinder from the 10th or 11th century, narrow at the door (about three metres up, accessed by ladder), conical-roofed, built by the monks of an early Christian monaster...

Read more: Listowel on Qualla

Image: Velela | Public domain