Exploring Killarney National Park with Kids and Teens, Part One: Ruins and Farms

When we checked in to our hotel in Killarney, the woman at reception asked where we were coming from and, when we told her Dublin, said, “oh, you HAVE come a long way!” It is less than 200 miles from Dublin to Killarney….about a three and a half hour drive. The perception of scale is different in Ireland.

It kind of makes sense, though. For example, the mountains in Ireland are pretty shrimpy, objectively speaking (the tallest is around 3400 feet), yet they manage to look majestic:

We had three full days to explore Killarney and Killarney National Park; in this post I’ll talk about our first day, which involved renting bikes and checking out Muckross Abbey and Muckross Traditional Farms.

 

We rented bikes at our hotel, Castlerosse. Castlerosse is on the other side of the town of Killarney from the National Park, so we had a fairly long way to go. There’s a lovely bike path that takes you to town from the hotel, so that part worked out well. Once you get to town, there’s a stretch where you have to go along the road for a little while (maybe half a mile or so?). Killarney, at least in summer, is a very busy place and, being in Ireland, it has pretty narrow roads. So we opted to walk the bikes along the sidewalk instead, which wasn’t ideal, but worked out fine. Then the bike path picked up again and took us into the park.

Muckross Abbey was our first stop. The well preserved ruins date to the 15th century, and they took all of us by surprise by being really, really awesome. It goes on an on, with new things to discover around every corner. We spent a long time wandering around (and had the place nearly to ourselves much of the time), having a picnic, and playing hide and seek.

I didn’t get a good picture of it, but you can see the yew tree peeking through below in the courtyard. The tree is believed to be as old as the monastery (yews were often planted in monasteries and churchyards).

Amy discovered that there are lots of Donoghue tombs in here….looking for Donoghue tombs (Dave and Amy’s ancestors on their mom’s side) is one of the reasons we were in Killarney in the first place, so it was a nice discovery, and Amy took a bunch of pictures to send back to Nana.

Then it was back on our bikes for the short ride over to Muckross House and Muckross Traditional Farms. Muckross House is a very fancy house that you can tour.

But we had gotten our fill of touring grand estates a few days earlier at Chatsworth, so we were just here to gawk at Muckross House from the outside and then move on to the adjacent Muckross Traditional Farms.

At this site, you follow a walking path around (there’s also a shuttle bus available if you need it) and see three farms of varying sizes, to give you a taste of rural life in Ireland in the 30s and 40s. There are lots of animals, so, of course, my kids loved it.

You come to the smallest farm first. There are interpreters at each farm to tell you all about what you’re looking at and, in some cases, to offer you fresh bread.

Killarney is full of views:

Farm #2. This one had piglets!

We stopped to visit some friendly goats on the way to farm #3:

The third farm is the biggest, with a cozy but sprawling farmhouse to tour and some outbuildings:

At this point, it was almost time for the daily milking demonstration….which, it turned out, was way back at the first farm we’d visited. One of the people working at the third farm heard Abe talking about how much he wanted to see it, though, and called up the shuttle bus to take us back there. The rest of the group opted to skip it and meet us back at the entrance, so it was just Abe, Dave, and I who got to see the cow.

 

At the farm we had our first encounters with very heavy Irish accents. Dave had to translate everything the milking guy was saying for Abe (at least as well as he could). Abe had actually been nervous about coming to England and Ireland because he was worried he wouldn’t understand anyone. But he did fine until we hit Killarney.

They also have a school here, but we didn’t get to see it because we were rushing by the time we finished seeing the cow get milked. And somewhere on the site there’s a petting farm where, we were told, we could see Irish Wolfhounds. But we didn’t come across this area and it got too late to go looking for it, sadly. It’s possible that they said, in fact, that there were Irish Wolfhound puppies, but I can’t remember for sure, so I’m going to pretend it was only grown up Irish Wolfhounds because it’s too sad to think that we missed Irish Wolfhound puppies.

Anyway, highly recommend Muckross Traditional Farms, particularly if there are any animal-loving kids in your group!

We still had a long ride back to Castlerosse, and we needed to get the bikes back before the rental place closed for the day, so we headed back after seeing the farm.

I was worried that the reverse trip was going to be terrible, since we were all tired from the day and it seemed like there’d be a lot of downhill on the way there….but it really wasn’t bad. Again, other than the part where we had to get off the bikes and walk them through the very crowded town.

All in all it was an excellent (and tiring) first day in Killarney! We found biking to be an excellent way to explore the park, and there are several bike rental places in town.