Just south of Tralee, on an old roadway climbing into the Slieve Mish Mountains, sits a large boulder local tradition calls Scotia's Grave. The story is unprovable but persistent: Scotia, a daughter of an Egyptian pharaoh and wife of a Milesian chieftain, was supposedly killed in battle against the Tuatha De Danaan and buried here, giving her name eventually to the country of Scotland. The story is medieval pseudo-history, but the boulder is real, and the roadway running south over the Slieve Mish is genuinely ancient. The town itself, where the road begins, was founded by Anglo-Normans in the 13th century at the confluence of small rivers and marshes at the head of Tralee Bay. The Normans were planners - they liked good defensive sites with water access and arable hinterlands. John Fitz-Thomas FitzGerald founded a Dominican monastery here, and was buried in it in 1260, his stone-effigy still surviving in fragments.

Tralee became a stronghold of the Earls of Desmond, the FitzGerald dynasty that ruled most of Munster from their castle in the town. In 1580, during the Desmond Rebellions against Elizabeth I, English forces burned medieval Tralee to the ground in retribution. Seven years later, Elizabeth granted the smoking remains to one of her soldiers, Edward Denny, and the Denny family would hold Tralee for the next three centuries. The Dennys built up the modern town. Sir Edward Denny, the 4th Baronet, was unusually decent: during the Great Famine of the 1840s, while many landlords raised rents to clear tenants from their fields, Denny held rents steady so his tenants could survive. He was also a noted Plymouth Brother, part of the evangelical movement that began in nearby Plymouth, England. Denny Street, completed in 1826 on the site of the old Desmond castle, is the wide Georgian thoroughfare that still defines downtown Tralee.

On Denny Street stands a statue of a Pikeman - a sculpted Irish rebel from the 1798 rising, commemorating that rebellion and the smaller ones of 1803, 1848, and 1867. The first version was unveiled in 1905. In 1921, during the War of Independence, the Black and Tans dragged it from its pedestal and destroyed it - a small act of vandalism in a campaign that included larger ones. In June 1939, the Pikeman was replaced by a new statue, this one sculpted by Albert Power of Dublin, and unveiled by Maud Gonne - the revolutionary, suffragist, and muse of W.B. Yeats. To stand in Denny Street today is to stand in a square where the British army destroyed a memorial, and the Republic put it back, with a sculpture unveiled by the woman Yeats had spent his life writing love poems to.

The Tralee Ship Canal is the kind of 19th-century infrastructure project that explains a lot about Victorian Ireland. The existing quay at Blennerville, three kilometres west, was silting up. Tralee needed bigger ships. So an Act of Parliament was passed in 1829, work began in 1832, and after fourteen years of funding troubles, the two-mile canal opened in 1846 - just as the Great Famine was reaching its worst. The canal worked, briefly. Then it too started silting. By the 1880s, Fenit Harbour was built further out as a deepwater port, connected by rail to Tralee, and the canal slumped into disuse. A century later, the Office of Public Works restored it as an amenity, with a redeveloped basin, apartments, and a towpath that's now part of the Dingle Way walking route. The restored Blennerville Windmill, Ireland's tallest working windmill, marks the canal's old western end.

In November 1920, the IRA in Kerry abducted and killed two RIC men. The Black and Tans - the British reserve police force largely composed of First World War veterans - responded by laying siege to the town. They closed every business in Tralee. They allowed no food in for a week. They burned houses and businesses connected to IRA activists. They shot dead three local people. By the end of the week, English and American newspapers were running stories about near-famine conditions in an Irish county town in peacetime. The international outcry was significant - the Tans' tactics in Kerry contributed to the broader collapse of British political support for the war in Ireland, and helped force the Truce in July 1921. Tralee was not unique in this experience, but the siege was unusually visible: the press was watching, and the town was big enough that the story spread.

The Rose of Tralee Festival began in 1959 as a tourism initiative based on the 19th-century song. The pageant - women of Irish heritage from around the world, each representing a particular city or region - has been a fixture of Irish television every August since. It is unironic, slightly old-fashioned, and improbably durable. The town it draws to itself spreads outward from Denny Street and the Mall: the Tralee Courthouse of 1834, the Dominican Church of the Holy Cross designed by George Ashlin in 1866, the Tralee Bay Wetlands of internationally recognised ecological importance, the Aqua Dome leisure centre, the County Library, Siamsa Tíre - the National Folk Theatre. Tralee is a working town with a working hinterland. The Roses come and go each August. The town keeps doing what it does the other eleven months.