Local man Tim Hannon is a wealth of knowledge about the history of Ballybunion and is worth tracking down if you find yourself in the town's famous golf club. He'll start by telling you about when the Vikings came to the area. "The whole place was full of deer, so that's what they ate, as well as salmon from the river," he says.

In more recent history, the 14th-century castle that divides the strands and is the focal point of the village was acquired from the Geraldines by the Bunyan family which is where Ballybunion gets its name. From the late 1940s, when the town began to blossom as a holiday resort, the Castle Hotel was the place to be, with "legal types and clergy" making up the bulk of the tourists. Dublin retailer Denis Guiney was a regular visitor when the new Irish wealthy began to flock to the town. "The hotel had a magnificent ballroom, women wore beautiful frocks and locals weren't allowed in," says Hannon. Back then the main street was so packed with priests in their official robes that local people nicknamed it the Vatican.

Gradually, the town opened up to the less privileged and by the 1970s was enjoying its heyday with tourists flocking from all over the country.

Ballybunion is famous for more than just bucket and spade holidays, though. The town was the site of the first transatlantic telephone transmission made from the Marconi wireless station in 1919 by WT Ditcham, a Marconi engineer. It was also home to the Listowel-Ballybunion railway, the first monorail in the world, which opened in 1888 and ran for 36 years.

Over the years Ballybunion has welcomed many famous visitors, notably the former US president, Bill Clinton, who came to play golf here in 1998. There's a bronze life-size statue of him beside the Garda station.

Inevitably, the group of young girls who hang out by the statue have been dubbed "The Monicas".