Killarney National Park

The heart of the park is the Muckross estate. Muckross House was completed in 1843 for Henry Arthur Herbert and his wife, the watercolourist Mary Balfour Herbert. In 1910 the American William Bowers Bourn bought the estate as a wedding present for his daughter Maud, who married Arthur Vincent, and in 1932 Arthur Vincent and Maud's parents gave it to the Irish State in her memory. It became the Bourn Vincent Memorial Park, Ireland's first national park, and the park has since grown to around 10,000 hectares managed by the National Parks and Wildlife Service, while Muckross House is run by a charitable trust.

Long before the estate, the area was home to religious communities. A monastery was founded on Innisfallen Island in Lough Leane in the seventh century and was occupied until the fourteenth; the Annals of Inisfallen, an important medieval chronicle, were written there. Muckross Abbey was founded in 1448 by Observantine Franciscans, and its ruins still stand among the trees. Ross Castle, a fifteenth-century tower house on the shore of Lough Leane, was extended in the seventeenth century. The park's red deer are described by the national parks service as the last surviving native herd in Ireland, present here since Neolithic times.

For people in Killarney the park is a back garden: locals jog and cycle its paths, families picnic by the lakes, and the drivers of the jaunting cars, known locally as jarveys, keep alive a long tradition of showing visitors around. The town's economy has long been tied to tourism in the park, and the landscape features in songs, poems and paintings that have shaped the image of Irish scenery around the world.