The National Park has far less in common than an Australian national park than it does a lovely cultivated English estate ... at least the bits that I saw of it, which were in fact once part of the Muckross Estate. The national park itself covers over 10,000 hectares, and was the first national park in Ireland and is now a Biosphere Reserve under the UNESCO Man and the Biosphere Programme.
Full of lakes, castles, rivers, stately homes, bogs, birds and deer, the park manages to feel both beautiful and tame, and wild and slightly dangerous - the latter due to the strong winds which were blowing while I was there, nearly knocking me sideways at times and making such a sound through the trees that I kept thinking there was a train line somewhere nearby.
I walked down to Ross Castle, catching glimpses of stags standing proudly in the mossy forest, and curiously eyeing my first Irish bog. As I looked at it, I thought of all the stories I've heard of bogs - secret pathways you have to know or risk falling in and never being seen again, supernatural creatures which carry lights to tempt followers in, bog cheese, bog men, the making of peat ... They are certainly dark, mesmerising, mysterious enough for anything and I gladly stayed on the path.
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| Boggy. |