Is it not so to this day?

Do I not meet scores of people who tell me they would love to go to
Kerry, but they have never been nearer than Killarney.

That is the sort of speech which makes me wonder how geography is
taught.

It is on a par with the remark of a prominent Arctic explorer, that he
had never been to Killarney because it was so far off.

People, however, who go there apparently like it.

The chief Elizabethan settlers in Kerry were William and Charles
Herbert, Valentine Brown, ancestor of the Kenmares, Edmund Denny, and
Captain Conway, whose daughter Avis married Robert Blennerhasset, while
a little later, in 1600, John Crosbie was made Bishop of Ardfert and
Aghadoe.

To-day the descendants of those settlers are still among the principal
folk in Kerry, though that is more due to their own selves than to the
support they had from any British Government.

This Valentine Brown, who was a worshipful and valiant knight, wrote a
discourse for settling Munster in 1584. His plan was to exterminate the
FitzGeralds and to protestantise Ireland; but by the irony of fate his
own son married a daughter of the Earl of Desmond and became a Roman
Catholic.