The copper seams on Ross Island were worked around 2400 BC, making them the earliest known metal mines in northwest Europe. The water that carried that ore is the same water crossed today by every Lakes of Killarney boat cruise.
Lough Leane covers roughly 19 square kilometres, the largest of three connected lakes set beneath the sandstone ridges of the MacGillycuddy's Reeks. Its Irish name, Loch Léin, translates as the lake of learning.
Innisfallen, a wooded islet near the northern shore, held a monastery founded about 640 AD by St Finian the Leper. Monks there compiled the Annals of Innisfallen, a chronicle of Irish and world events kept across some five centuries. Brian Boru is said to have studied on the island. The ruined oratory and its Romanesque doorway still stand among ash and holly. The manuscript now rests in the Bodleian Library at Oxford.
Ross Castle, the departure point at Ross Road, is a fifteenth-century O'Donoghue tower house ringed by a bawn wall with two rounded turrets. It surrendered in 1652, among the last Irish strongholds to fall in the Cromwellian campaign, after English gunboats were hauled overland from Castlemaine and floated onto the lake. Local legend credits a prophecy about a warship for the garrison's collapse. Killarney lake tours have run from this shoreline since the Victorian era, when the railway reached the town in 1853 and turned the demesne into one of Europe's earliest mass tourist destinations. Lakes of Killarney boat cruise tours still follow those Victorian channels.
The park itself, Ireland's first, was formed in 1932 when the Muckross Estate was presented to the state as the Bourn Vincent Memorial Park. UNESCO designated the wider area a Biosphere Reserve in 1982. Its 10,000-plus hectares hold the country's largest remnant of native sessile oak woodland, the Reenadinna yew wood on the Muckross peninsula, and the only wild native red deer herd in Ireland. Arbutus unedo, the strawberry tree, grows on the lake islands, a Lusitanian species otherwise at home in Iberia. A Lakes of Killarney boat cruise tour passes the Old Weir Bridge at the Meeting of the Waters, where the Upper Lake spills through Muckross Lake and on into Lough Leane.
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