The Gap of Dunloe is not a valley carved by a river. It is a glacial breach, cut when ice ground south between the Purple Mountain group and MacGillycuddy's Reeks during the last glaciation, leaving a narrow defile roughly eleven kilometres long.
Five small lakes — Coosaun Lough, Black Lake, Cushnavally, Auger and Black Lough — chain along its floor, linked by the River Loe. The Wishing Bridge, a low stone arch near the midpoint, takes its name from a local belief that wishes made upon it are granted.
Human traffic here is old. The Ogham stones at Dunloe, seven pillars inscribed in the fourth to sixth centuries, were gathered from a nearby souterrain and now stand near the gap's northern approach. Kate Kearney's Cottage, at the entrance, dates to the nineteenth century and marks the point where Victorian tourists exchanged carriages for jaunting cars. Those travellers were following a route already popularised by 1750s guidebooks; the gap of dunloe & lakes of killarney boat tour of today traces that same line.
The lake half of the journey belongs to a different landscape. Lough Leane, Muckross Lake and the Upper Lake form Ireland's only chain of connected freshwater lakes of this scale, joined by the shallow channel called the Meeting of the Waters and passed beneath the eighteenth-century Old Weir Bridge. Innisfallen Island in Lough Leane holds a monastic ruin founded around 640 AD, where the Annals of Innisfallen were compiled. Copper was mined on Ross Island beside the same shore as early as 2400 BC.
Killarney National Park, designated in 1932 from the Muckross Estate, was named a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve in 1982. It holds Ireland's largest remaining native oak woodland and the country's only wild red deer herd, unbroken since the last ice age. Yew woods at Reenadinna are among the largest in Europe. Guided gap of dunloe & lakes of killarney boat tour tours cross both halves of that designation in a single day — mountain pass and lake system, geology and monastic ruin, held inside one protected boundary.
5 hr
