Waterville sits on a narrow neck of land - an isthmus - between Lough Currane to the east and Ballinskelligs Bay to the west, with the short Currane River linking the two. The village has 555 people by the 2022 census, which makes it small even by Kerry standards. The Butlers, an 18th-century landed family, built the original Waterville House at the mouth of the River Currane and gave the place its English name. The Irish name was An Coireán, which referred to the shape of the bay - coireán meaning a little cauldron. The N70, the Ring of Kerry road, runs straight through the middle of the village. Coastal erosion has been working on the western shore since the early 20th century, and the village is still working on holding it back. Living on an isthmus, you become attentive to the sea.

From 1884 until well into the 20th century, Waterville was one of the most important communication hubs in Europe. The first successful transatlantic telegraph cable had been landed in 1865-66 at Valentia Island just north of here, connecting Ireland to Heart's Content in Newfoundland. The Commercial Cable Company, owned by John Mackay and James Gordon Bennett, then built their own competing cables in the 1880s, choosing Waterville as their European hub. Their cable ran from a townland called Spunkane outside the village to Hazel Hill near Canso, Nova Scotia. From Waterville, additional cables ran to Weston-super-Mare in England and Le Havre in France. The cable station brought houses, jobs, and a steady traffic of telegraphists from England and America. During the Irish Civil War, on 7 August 1922, IRA irregulars seized the Waterville cable station and the communication line between Paris and New York went down. In 2000 the cable stations received an IEEE Milestone Award for their place in the history of electrical science.

The Chaplin family's first visit in 1959 was supposed to be a quiet fishing trip. They stayed at the Butler Arms Hotel and discovered that the locals would mostly leave them alone - this being rural Kerry, where staring at famous people is considered impolite. The Chaplins kept coming for the next eleven years. Charlie played the piano in the hotel lounge. Oona shopped in the village. The children played on the beach. After Charlie's death, the family kept the connection alive, and in 2011 the village launched the first Charlie Chaplin Comedy Film Festival with permission from the estate. The festival has run every August since. Comedians come from around the world. The whole village turns into a venue. It is the kind of cultural connection a tiny Kerry village should not really have, except that Charlie Chaplin spent eleven summers here and let it become true.

The Chaplin statue is not the only one in the village. There is also a bronze of Mick O'Dwyer, the Kerry Gaelic footballer and manager who was born nearby. O'Dwyer played for Kerry through the 1960s and 1970s and then managed them to four All-Ireland titles in five years between 1978 and 1981 - one of the most dominant runs in the history of Gaelic football. He went on to manage Kildare, Laois, Wicklow and Clare, and is generally regarded as one of the greatest Gaelic football managers of all time. Other Waterville natives include the Irish-American diplomat Samantha Power, who served as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations under President Obama and administrator of USAID under Biden, and who maintains a holiday home here and was married in the village. John Moores, the future founder of Littlewoods, worked as a telegraphist in Waterville between November 1920 and May 1922, learning the trade that would make him one of Britain's richest men.

Long before any of the cable companies or the Chaplins or the comedians, the Bronze Age people of this corner of Kerry built a four-stone alignment 1.5 kilometres south-south-east of where the village now stands. Eightercua is roughly 3,700 years old, give or take a few centuries, and it is by tradition the burial site of Scéine, wife of Amergin the Milesian bard. Whether the alignment marks her grave or simply tracks the solstice sun, it ties Waterville into a much longer story than the telegraph or the films. The village's adult education centre is named Tech Amergin, after the same mythological figure. From the cable station to the comedy festival, from Charlie Chaplin to the Bronze Age burial alignment, Waterville keeps adding layers without obviously losing any of them.