The History of Killarney National Park

Hours, prices and access verified by the Killarney National Park Tours team — last checked August 13, 2026

A Franciscan friary of 1448, two great estates that between them owned most of this valley, and a gift to the State in 1932 that made Ireland’s first national park. Everything below can still be stood in.

1448 — the Franciscans at Muckross

The friary at Muckross was founded in 1448 by the Observantine branch of the Franciscan order, with the political backing and the money of the Gaelic chieftain Donal Mac Mór Mac Chartaigh. The Observantines were the strict wing of the order, and this was a working religious house at the centre of Mac Carthaigh territory.

The yew that fills its cloister is thought to be up to 400 years old. Charles Smith saw it in 1756 and wrote that its branches spread over the cloister niches like a great umbrella, which is exactly what they still do.

The Desmond Rebellions and Cromwell’s roof

The friary was sacked during the Desmond Rebellions in the late sixteenth century, in the long collapse of Gaelic and Old English power in Munster. The friars kept returning.

In 1652 Cromwell’s forces settled it: they raided the friary and took the roof off, specifically to make it uninhabitable. It has stood open to the sky for over three and a half centuries, and the walls, cloister and tower are all still standing.

The Brownes, the Herberts, and two great demesnes

The documented history of this ground runs back to the early seventeenth century, and it is largely the history of two landed families. The Brownes, Earls of Kenmare, held the Killarney House and Knockreer side, against the town. The Herberts held Muckross.

What both families built was a demesne — a designed landscape of woods, drives and planting around a big house. The park you walk through today is largely their layout, which is why the paths go where they do and why the oaks stand where they stand.

1932 — the Muckross Estate becomes Ireland’s first national park

The Muckross Estate was presented to the State in 1932, and with it Ireland got its first national park. Nothing like it existed in the country before, and the decision to hold this particular valley in public ownership shaped every national park that followed.

The gift is the reason the lakes and the oakwoods were never broken up, and the reason there is still no admission charge to walk in.

The Bourn Vincent Memorial Park Act

The gift was formalised by the Bourn Vincent Memorial Park Act of 1932, and that Act is still the legal basis on which Muckross House is managed today. The arrangement between the State and the house is written into it.

It is an unusual piece of legislation to still be load-bearing after nearly a century, and it is why the house has the particular status it does — a national property, run under a specific agreement.

Knockreer House, and how the Kenmare lands joined it

The park did not stop at the Muckross boundary. The Kenmare estate lands — Knockreer, Killarney House and their gardens — came into the park later, joining the two great demesnes into the single landscape the boundary now encloses.

Knockreer House, the last of the Kenmare mansions, is now the park’s education centre. It is not open as a visitor attraction, but the parkland around it is the part of the park you can walk to from the railway station.

1981 — a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve

In 1981 the park was designated a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, on the strength of its ecological diversity and the rare plants in it — the Lusitanian flora, the yew wood, the native oak. The designation recognises a place where conservation and human use have to work together.

It is worth being precise about this, because tour marketing often is not: the park is a Biosphere Reserve, which is a different thing from a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and it does not hold the latter.

What survives, and where you can stand in it

More than you would expect. The friary of 1448 is complete to the wall-tops and free to walk into. Ross Castle still stands over Lough Leane and can be toured inside. Muckross House is furnished and open, and the demesne planting around both houses is the eighteenth and nineteenth-century layout.

The jaunting car run out to Ross Castle and the carriage tour that takes in Muckross Abbey cover this ground on the same roads that visitors have been shown by jarveys since the 1800s.

Chronology