Killarney ( ; , meaning 'church of sloes') is a town in County Kerry, Ireland. It is on the northeastern shore of Lough Leane, part of Killarney National Park, and is home to St Mary's Cathedral, Ross Castle, Muckross House and Abbey, the Lakes of Killarney, MacGillycuddy's Reeks, Purple Mountain, Mangerton Mountain, Paps Mountain, the Gap of Dunloe and Torc Waterfall. Its natural heritage, history and location on the Ring of Kerry make Killarney a popular tourist destination. Tourism has underpinned the town's economy and shaped its development for more than two and a half centuries, and Killarney has been described the birthplace of Irish tourism.
Killarney's population was 14,412 as of the 2022 census, making it the second largest in the county. It won the Best Kept Town award in 2007 in a cross-border competition jointly organised by the Department of the Environment and the Northern Ireland Amenity Council. In 2011, Killarney was named Ireland's tidiest town and the cleanest town in the country by Irish Business Against Litter. It was again named Ireland's tidiest large town in 2023.
History Early history and development Killarney featured prominently in early Irish history, with religious settlements playing an important part of its recorded history. Its first significantly historical settlement was the monastery on nearby Innisfallen Island founded in 640 by St. Finian the Leper, which was occupied for approximately 850 years. It operated until the monks were dispossessed in 1594 by Elizabeth I, Queen of England. According to tradition, the Irish High King Brian Boru received his education at Innisfallen. The island's monastic ruins were later refurbished by the Kenmare estate as a dining place for visitors, part of a broader effort by the town's landlords to open the area up to tourism.
Aghadoe, the local townland which overlooks present day Killarney, may have begun as a pagan religious site.Long, Tom. "Tracing Our Faith." Fossa & Aghadoe: Our Heritage and History. ed. Jim Larner. Fossa Historical Society. 2007. . p 1. The site has also been associated with the 5th century missionary St. Abban, but 7th century ogham stones mark the first clear evidence of Aghadoe being used as an important site.Long, 1. According to legend, St. Finian founded a monastery at Aghadoe in the 6th or 7th century. The first written record of a monastery dates from 939 AD in the Annals of Innisfallen where the Aghadoe monastery is referred to as the "Old Abbey."
Following the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland in 1169, the Normans built Parkavonear Castle, also at Aghadoe. The castle was perhaps intended as an early warning outpost due to its views of the entire Killarney valley and lakes region.
Ross Castle was built on the lake shore in the late 15th century by local ruling clan the O'Donoghues Mor (Ross). Ownership of the castle changed hands during the Desmond Rebellions of the 1580s to the Mac Carty Mor. The castle, since refurbished, remains on the shore of Lough Leane and is open to visitors for a small admission fee.
Muckross Abbey was founded in 1448 as a Franciscan friary for the Observantine Franciscans by Donal McCarthy Mor. The abbey was burned down by Cromwellian forces under General Ludlow in 1654, and today remains a ruin. By the 18th century, the friary's cloister, with its enormous yew tree, had become one of the district's most visited ruins, though the quantity of disinterred human bone left underfoot there drew repeated complaints from travel writers until the Herbert family eventually had the site cleared.
17th and 18th centuries
Killarney's tourism history goes back at least to the mid 18th century, when Thomas, fourth Viscount Kenmare (Lord Kenmare), began to attract visitors and new residents to the town. The date of 1747 was used in recent 250-year celebrations to honour the history of Killarney tourism, though a report previewing those celebrations instead dated the town's beginnings as a tourist resort to 1754, the year Kenmare came into his inheritance. On travelling to the estate he had inherited, Kenmare found boggy, barren land and considerable debt, but recognised the tourism potential of the lakes' islands and of Muckross Abbey and Ross Castle, and set about planting trees, draining bogs, mending roads and encouraging the building of inns.
Killarney's lakes and mountains had already begun to attract the attention of travellers drawn to landscapes associated with the sublime, a taste that would later be applied to England's Lake District. Writing in 1735, Lord Orrery described the lake to a friend as a "Beauty of Nature", noting its many small islands and the echoes produced when hounds pursued deer through the surrounding hills. The historian Luke Gibbons has characterised the opening up of Killarney to visitors after the 1740s as one of the founding moments of European Romanticism, while the traveller John Bush, writing in 1764, described the lake's mountains using the sublime vocabulary of the period, calling them "horrible and frightful precipices". By 1777, the topographer Thomas Campbell felt able to omit Killarney from his own survey of southern Ireland on the grounds that the lakes had already been described so often by other writers.
Killarney's landlords, chiefly the Brownes of Kenmare and, from the 1770s, the Herbert family of Muckross, organised much of the visitor experience on their estates. Kenmare controlled the boats used to tour the lakes, restricted them to oars rather than sails because of sudden mountain squalls, and set fixed hire charges through the town's hotels. Visitors frequently complained about the cost of hiring boatmen, buglers and cannon fire to produce the echoes for which the lakes became famous, a spectacle enjoyed by travellers including the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who visited Ross Castle in 1848 and was inspired to write the poem later appended to The Princess: A Medley. An artificial deer hunt, in which a stag was driven from the mountains into the lake and captured by boatmen before being released, was staged for visitors on the Kenmare estate and has been described by later commentators as an early Irish example of a staged tourist spectacle. Local guides, boatmen and vendors, some of the poorest members of Killarney's pre-Famine population, relied heavily on income from visitors, and Kate Kearney's Cottage, built at the mouth of the Gap of Dunloe around 1807 and named after a popular parlour song, remains a visitor stop to the present day.
Muckross House was built in the 1840s by the Herbert family, who were connected to Queen Victoria by marriage and spent over a decade trying to persuade her to visit, in the course of which they nearly bankrupted themselves improving the house and gardens. The house was sold on twice before its final private owners, the barrister Arthur Rose Vincent and his parents-in-law, presented the 11,000-acre estate to the Irish state in 1932 as the Bourn Vincent Memorial Park, forming the country's first national park, later expanded by further donations including Killarney House.
Killarney was granted town commissioners under the Towns Improvement (Ireland) Act 1854, which was converted to an urban district under the Local Government (Ireland) Act 1898, and a town council under the Local Government Act 2001.
Killarney benefited greatly from the coming of the railway in July 1853. British trade directory publisher Isaac Slater noted that there were three hotels in the town in 1846Slater, Isaac. Slater's Directory. 1846. but by 1854, one year after the coming of the railway, James Fraser named seven hotels and described their locations:the Railway Hotel opposite the Railway Station; the Kenmare Arms and Hibernia which are on the main street and immediately opposite the church... the Victoria which is about a mile [1.5 km] to the west of the town on the shores of the Lower Lake; the Lake View which is about the same distance to the east of the town and also on the shore of the Lower Lake; the Muckross about two and a half miles [4 km] away and near the Muckross Lake and the Torc which occupies an elevated site about a mile and a half [2.5 km] from the town on the hill which rises immediately over the Lake Hotel.Fraser, James. Guide to Killarney. 1854 An 1852 guidebook, the Irish Tourist's Illustrated Handbook for Visitors to Ireland, devoted several pages to Killarney and to the prices then charged by the town's hotels, reflecting the district's status as one of Ireland's best known destinations by the mid 19th century, alongside places such as the Giant's Causeway and Bray.
In 1858, Irish-born Victorian journalist, Samuel Carter Hall named O'Sullivan's Hotel and the Innisfallen rather than the Hibernia and Torc, but Isaac Slater also named the Hibernia in 1846. At the time he was writing, tours of the Ring of Kerry were already an industry and Killarney was considered the starting point of the circuitous route. He was fascinated by the horses' endurance on the two-day trip, and leaves clear advice for other travellers; It is a common and wise custom of those who make this tour, and are not pressed for time, to hire the carriage at the hotel in Killarney and continue with it 'all the way round.' It is absolutely marvellous what these mountain bred horses can get through "thinking nothing" of thirty miles [50 km] for days together or even fifty miles [80 km] in a single day.Hall, Carter. A Week in Killarney. 1858 As part of the trip, he noted that there were hotels in Glenbeigh and Waterville along with a "comfortable inn", which is now the Butler Arms Hotel.
A visit by Queen Victoria in 1861 gave the town some international exposure. The visit followed the West End success of Dion Boucicault's play The Colleen Bawn, which opened at London's Adelphi Theatre in September 1860 and relocated the story of the Colleen Bawn murder, a real killing that had taken place near Limerick in 1819, to the Lakes of Killarney. The queen was said to have seen the play three times and commissioned a series of paintings of its scenes, and her wish to see the landscape she had encountered on stage is thought to have contributed to her decision to visit Killarney later that year rather than the cities she had previously toured. The play's popularity led local boatmen to identify a 'Devil's Island' and a 'Colleen Bawn Rock' on Muckross Lake to satisfy visitors seeking the sites associated with the drama, even though the specific locations described in the play were fictional.
20th century Killarney was heavily involved in the Irish War of Independence. The town, and indeed the entire county, had strong republican ties, and skirmishes with British forces happened on a regular basis. The Great Southern Hotel was for a time taken over by the British, both as an office and barracks, and to protect the neighbouring railway station. The most notable engagement of the war in the district was the Headford Ambush of 21 March 1921, in which upwards of 30 members of the IRA's Kerry No. 2 Brigade Flying Column, led by Dan Allman, attacked a train carrying soldiers of the 1st Battalion Royal Fusiliers as it changed at Headford Junction a few kilometres from the town. The fifty-minute engagement, considered one of the largest and most successful actions fought by the IRA against regular British forces during the war, left two IRA volunteers, Allman and Jimmy Bailey, and nine Fusiliers dead, along with three civilian cattle dealers who were caught in the crossfire. News of the ambush was raised in the British parliament and raised the profile of the Kerry IRA nationally, setting the scene for further violence in the county.