The barony of Iveragh in County Kerry forms the extreme western part of the peninsula that runs out from Killarney. It is mountainous and weather-beaten tourist country, facing the Atlantic and separated from the rest of Ireland by a range of mountains. The O’Connells had been the principal family in the barony for some centuries before Daniel O’Connell was born in 1775. Several branches of his family along with other Gaelic families—McCarthys, O’Mahonys, O’Sullivans and Sugrues—had survived the turmoil and confiscations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the penal laws of the eighteenth. By the time of O’Connell’s birth these families were small landlords—frequently middlemen—whose distinction owed more to lineage and ‘following’ than to landed wealth. The one substantial landlord among them was Maurice O’Connell of Derrynane, usually known as Hunting-Cap, the head of the senior branch of the O’Connells. As a smuggler, farmer and landlord, by lending money to landlords and by thrift, he had greatly increased his inherited property so that by the beginning of the nineteenth century he could be described as a rich man. A childless widower, he adopted his nephew Daniel as his heir.