Christianization, Norman conquests, Cromwellian confiscations, religious persecution and Irish–European smuggling are all examined and shown to be much messier enterprises than popularly imagined, while equally complex was the village’s founder, Theobald MacGhee, a smuggler comfortably married into one of Kerry’s high-status gentry families.

Denis Casey is a graduate of University College Dublin and the University of Cambridge. He has taught medieval and early modern history, literature and manuscript studies at the universities of Maynooth, Helsinki, Cambridge and UCD.