Gleann na Ginte
Bernard Brothers Loop.

11 November 1583

These woods are also where the Desmond rebellion ended. On 11 November 1583 Gerald FitzGerald, the last Earl of Desmond, was killed here, four miles east of Tralee, at the end of the Second Desmond Rebellion, 1579–1583, which had cost him his castles and his followers. He was down to a handful of attendants and shabby clothes. One account places him in a ruined house in front of a fire, asking his pursuers to spare him and identifying himself as the Earl of Desmond. They took his head to the Earl of Ormond, who sent it to the Queen, and it was set on London Bridge.

Bóthar an Iarla, the Earl’s road

The Ordnance Survey put the grave on its 1841 map, on the north side of a track it named Bóthar an Iarla, the Earl’s road. The surveyors measured the road at five feet wide and recorded a local tradition that an oak at the western end marked where he had been killed, with the grave thirty yards east: a hollow five feet by three, ringed by a low bank, with shoots coming off a decayed tree said to have been planted there to mark it. A stone plaque put up in 1983 records the date. The schoolchildren of Kilduff, writing it down in 1938, said a light was sometimes seen there at night.

The Earl's Castle

Two metres off the recorded line, in Tooreen, the 1841 Ordnance Survey marked the Site of Desmond Castle. Its surveyors found nothing there but a heap of small stones overgrown with moss, and wrote down what they were told: that the place was called the Earl's Castle, and that the Earl of Desmond had taken refuge in it for a time before he was killed at Glanageenty, in the same parish.

So the loop passes the shelter and the grave, a couple of kilometres apart, and the only evidence for the first is a sentence taken down by a surveyor twenty-eight years before anyone marked the second.

Faill Dearg, the red cliff

Lower down, at the bend where Glanageenty meets Tooreen, water drips from a red cliff face. That is Faill Dearg, and people once sent for the water when somebody was sick. Rounds were being walked there before 1860. Whether it was ever formally a holy well was already being argued over when the schools collected the story in the 1930s, one man pointing out that his father would surely have said so if it were. These are accounts of earlier devotion; they do not establish whether the place is visited today.