After another lovely breakfast, we decided to take the mountain pass road from Kenmore through Killarney National Park, which took us to Lady’s View
Ladies View
and down to a parking area beside Torc Waterfall, where we hired a jaunting car to drive us around Muckross Gardens and Abbey.
It was a great experience being driven by a third generation driver, with the clip-clop of Polly’s hooves as we drove through the park and passed the house that was built in 1833 by an Englishman out of English sandstone and sold in 1899 to a Guinness, who rented it out for hunting parties.
In 1911 it was bought by an American gold mine owner as a wedding present for his daughter. Unfortunately, she died a year later and the family donated the house and 11,00o acres to Ireland in her memory. It became the first National Park in Ireland.
The Franciscan Abbey was was built in 1448 around a yew tree that was 200 years old at the time.
It was burned first by Henry VIII and then by Cromwell in 1652 and subsequently abandoned.
The gardens that surround Muckross House are spectacular, with hundred year old trees and flowering rhodedenron and azaleas.
Our driver dropped us back at Torc Waterfall (meaning boar in Gaelic).
Next we visited Ross castle, a tower house built in the mid 1400s by the O’Donohue clan. It is a tower house, with slit windows, murder holes, and double oak doors, meant to defend against the cattle raids of nearby clans. The clan took 1500 cattle and 7000 sheep from another clan.
Ross Castle
The there we made our way to Adare, which was very crowded on a Sat, but not as busy as the Fitzgerald Woodland House where we were staying. They were hosting a wedding and a half dozen first communion celebrations, so we were conspicuously underdressed for the crowd in the lobby.
That evening we went into Adare, with its thatched roofed cottages for what was once again an amazing pub meal of duck and steak.