Qualla: Ventry

Ventry: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ogmios, CC BY-SA 3.0. On the fourth of October 1939, twenty-eight Greek sailors waded ashore at Ventry. Their ship, the MV Diamantis, had been torpedoed the day before by the German U-boat U-35, and rather than leave the crew to the Atlantic the U-boat's captain had picked them up and carried them, on the deck of a war machine, into a neutral Irish harbour. Ventry's official name is Ceann Trá, the head of the strand, and the village sits seven kilometres west of Dingle in a Gaeltacht where Irish is still the working language. The bay that received those sailors has been receiving travellers of one kind or another for at least two thousand years, and almost every century has left its mark on the long sandy beach.

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Image: Ogmios | CC BY-SA 3.0

Ventry: A Battle in the Fenian Cycle

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Barbara Walsh from Ireland, CC BY 2.0. Six kilometres west of the village, on the lip of a cliff that drops straight to the sea, sit the ruins of Dún Beag, an Iron Age promontory fort. Nearby at Kilvickadownig stand beehive houses, drystone domes built without mortar, and the reputed grave of Caol Mac Crimthainn, who ...

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Image: Barbara Walsh from Ireland | CC BY 2.0

Ventry: The Knight of Kerry's Castle

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ingo Mehling, CC BY-SA 3.0. Inside the parish stands Rahinnane Castle, once the residence of the Knight of Kerry, a hereditary title held by the FitzGerald family. The castle was raised on the site of an older ringfort, and a second ring was added around it with walls six metres high, which from a distance ...

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Image: Ingo Mehling | CC BY-SA 3.0

Ventry: Páidí, Goodman, and the Voice of Ventry

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ceoil, CC BY-SA 4.0. Ventry is a small place, but its names travel. Páidí Ó Sé, one of the great Kerry footballers of the modern era, kept a pub across from the parish church until his death in 2012; the building is still there and still a fixture of West Kerry life. In the nineteenth century, Canon ...

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Image: Ceoil | CC BY-SA 4.0

Ventry: The Diamantis Comes Ashore

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kresspahl (talk) 22:33, 12 May 2013 (UTC), CC BY 3.0. The plaque went up in October 2009, seventy years after the event. The Greek ambassador came; the German ambassador to Ireland came; the mayor of Oinousses, the small Aegean island where many of the Diamantis crew were from, came across Europe to be there. The story it commemorat...

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Image: Kresspahl (talk) 22:33, 12 May 2013 (UTC) | CC BY 3.0