Killarney

Ireland's first tourist town, made by the lakes and by the Victorians: Queen Victoria's visit in 1861 set the fashion. Killarney National Park was the first in the state, and holds the last native red deer herd and one of the last oak woods in Ireland.

St Finian the Leper founded a monastery on Innisfallen Island in Lough Leane in 640, and it lasted about 850 years, until Elizabeth I dispossessed the monks in 1594; tradition says Brian Boru was educated there. At Aghadoe, above the town, 7th-century ogham stones mark an early church site, and the Normans built Parkavonear Castle there. The O'Donoghue Mór built Ross Castle on the lake shore in the late 15th century, and Donal McCarthy Mór founded Muckross Abbey for the Franciscans in 1448; Cromwellian troops burned it in 1654.

Killarney's life as a resort began in the mid-18th century, when Thomas Browne, fourth Viscount Kenmare, inherited a boggy, indebted estate in 1754 and set about planting trees, draining bogs, mending roads and encouraging inns, seeing what visitors would make of the lakes, Muckross and Ross Castle. By then writers were already praising the scenery; the historian Luke Gibbons has called the opening of Killarney to visitors one of the founding moments of European Romanticism.

Drawn from the History section of the Wikipedia article on Killarney ↗, rewritten here and adding nothing it does not say; licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.

• Aghadoe · round tower · 3 km
• Dunloe Ogham Stones · ogham stone · 9 km
• Ross Castle · castle · 3 km
• Parkavonear Castle · castle · 4 km
• Ballymalis Castle · castle · 13 km

Straight-line distances from the town centre, from each site's documented coordinates.

• Dunloe Ogham Stones · Eight ogham stones in a circle by the road to the Gap — Ireland's earliest writing, notches on the edge of the stone naming forgotten chiefs.
• Ross Island copper mines · Among the earliest copper mines in north-west Europe, worked from 2400 BC by Beaker-culture miners with fire and stone hammers — beside Killarney's tourist lake.
• Lough Leane — O'Donoghue's return · Every May Day at dawn the chieftain O'Donoghue rides across the lake on a white horse; to see him brings a year's good luck.

All of these are pinned on the Hidden Ireland map.