The ruins of Brown’s Castle stand on the coast of north Kerry at Clashmealcon, near Kerry Head, where the land drops sharply to the Atlantic. Built in the thirteenth century – most likely by Sir Reginald Brown, who served as High Sheriff of Kerry and Limerick – the castle passed through several hands over the centuries, becoming one of the Desmond castles before being held by the Anglo-Norman Browne family, who put the sea caves directly beneath it to practical use as a hiding place for smuggled goods. The castle was destroyed by Cromwellian forces in the seventeenth century, and only its ruins remain.

Just a hundred yards to the east lie the Clashmealcon Caves, which carry their own dark history. Used by Whiteboys as a refuge, and later the scene of a prolonged and fatal Civil War siege in April 1923 in which six anti-Treaty IRA men and two National Army soldiers lost their lives, the caves have accumulated a great deal of human suffering over the centuries.

It is from the castle’s moat, according to local tradition, that the most unusual resident of Clashmealcon makes its nightly appearance. The figure described is a dog – earless, ghostly, emerging from the water after dark to hunt rabbits in the surrounding area before disappearing again. It bears a resemblance to the Shuck, the spectral black dog of Irish and wider Celtic folklore, but the accounts attached to Clashmealcon give it none of the malevolence usually associated with that tradition. This is a dog going about its business – a curious, solitary presence rather than an omen or a threat.

Whether it belongs to the castle’s long human history or to something older in the landscape around it is not recorded.