The Farranfore-Valentia Harbour line opened in 1893, built by the Great Southern and Western Railway to connect Kerry's interior to the country's western edge. Valentia Island was, at the time, one of the most strategically important places in the western world. The first successful transatlantic telegraph cable had been landed there in 1866, and for decades messages between Europe and North America flowed through the cable station on the island. The railway brought engineers, workers, parts, and passengers to that frontier. It ran for sixty-seven years - through two world wars, the War of Independence, and the long withdrawal of rural rail across Ireland - before closing in 1960 as cars and lorries made it obsolete. The rails came up. The corridor stayed.

The proposal to convert the corridor into a greenway emerged in the 2010s, part of a broader Irish enthusiasm for rail trails. The Great Western Greenway in Mayo had proved the model: take an old railway, lay a smooth surface, add signage and bridges, and watch cyclists and walkers turn a quiet rural area into a destination. South Kerry, with its dramatic coastal scenery and the Ring of Kerry already drawing tourists, looked ideal. Kerry County Council planned a twenty-seven-kilometre route from Glenbeigh to Cahersiveen, with options to extend further toward Reenard and ultimately Valentia. The route would cross several substantial structures - including a viaduct that engineers later described as 'the most challenging section' of the build.

What followed was not a construction project but a legal one. Compulsory purchase orders to acquire strips of land along the old railway corridor met sustained opposition from some landowners. Two legal challenges aimed to halt the greenway in 2021, citing planning failures and environmental impacts. The High Court rejected them in July 2021. Permission to construct was upheld in October. By December, Supreme Court proceedings had been initiated. On the eighth of February 2022, the Supreme Court rejected the applications for leave to appeal, and Kerry County Council announced that it could finally proceed. The fight had taken years and produced thick stacks of court filings. The corridor itself, meanwhile, had grown wild - hawthorn and gorse colonising the old ballast, sheep grazing where trains had run.

Construction has been deliberate. The first section - a 3.1-kilometre stretch near Kells - opened in December 2025. A further section between the Glenbeigh trailhead and Mountain Stage opened in early April 2026, bringing roughly seven kilometres of the trail into public use. The viaduct section remains exceptionally difficult - the original stone arches required reinforcement, the deck needed rebuilding, and the engineering had to satisfy both modern safety standards and the heritage protections that come with a structure more than a century old. Kerry County Council is progressing the remaining phases of the project, which will ultimately provide a thirty-two-kilometre trail from Glenbeigh to Reenard, with the estimated total cost now standing at €72 million. Public consultation on the extension from Cahersiveen to Reenard began in October 2024 - planning for the next phase even as the first phase was only just beginning to open. The patience required is not unusual for projects of this kind. The pace, however, frustrates many who have watched the corridor sit unused for decades.

Where the greenway is open, riders and walkers trace a route that runs near the coast, with views across Dingle Bay to the mountains of the Dingle Peninsula and inland to the high ground of the MacGillycuddy's Reeks. They pass through farmland that has been worked for generations, cross streams that empty into the Atlantic, and ride over the same stone bridges Victorian engineers built to carry trains to the edge of the country. The full thirty-two kilometres, when complete, will be a half-day's easy cycling - but the scenery is among the finest in Ireland. The trail's value is partly transport and partly heritage. The railway corridor is a piece of nineteenth-century engineering being given a twenty-first-century purpose. Slowly.