Killarney Lakes
— — a dark mirror under the Reeks.
Not only on a wall.
“Three lakes in a chain through Killarney National Park, joined by a single river that meets at the Old Weir Bridge. The largest, Lough Leane, holds Innisfallen Island and the ruins of a medieval monastery. The Macgillycuddy's Reeks rise behind everything. The water reads dark, peat-stained from the catchment, until the light catches it and turns it silver. Red deer still drink at the shore in the morning, the same continuous herd that has been here since the last Ice Age. People have been writing about this view for two hundred years and they don't seem to have run out of things to say.
Killarney Lakes, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
The Lakes of Killarney are a chain of three connected lakes in the southwest of Ireland, in County Kerry, set within Killarney National Park. Lough Leane, the largest at roughly 19 square kilometres, lies closest to the town of Killarney at an elevation of about 22 metres above sea level. Muckross Lake (the Middle Lake) and the Upper Lake sit higher and deeper to the south, the three connected by the Long Range river. The chain is held in a basin formed by the Macgillycuddy's Reeks, the highest mountain range in Ireland, rising to 1,038 metres at Carrauntoohil. The park itself, established in 1932 from the donated Muckross Estate, was named a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve in 1981.
The dark, near-black colour of the lake water comes from peat in the surrounding catchment. Rainfall draining through the bogs and old oak and yew woodland of the park carries tannins into the lakes, which absorb the shorter wavelengths of light and leave the surface reading brown to black under cloud. The same chemistry holds the endemic Killarney shad, a freshwater herring relict from the last glaciation found only in Lough Leane. Muckross Lake is the deepest of the three at about 73 metres, deep enough that its surface holds the reflection of Torc Mountain even on a windless morning. The Meeting of the Waters at the Old Weir Bridge is where all three lakes briefly run together.
Killarney is reached most easily by road from Cork (about 90 km east) or from Dublin (about 300 km northeast). The park is open all year and free to enter. May and June bring the longest light and the lowest rainfall, with rhododendron flowering on the slopes (much of it invasive Rhododendron ponticum the park has worked to remove since the 1980s). October turns the oak and beech of Muckross gold. Winter is wet; Killarney averages around 1,400 mm of rain a year, but the lakes hold their mirror best in the still afternoons of a cold, clear December. Ross Castle and Muckross House run reduced hours from November through March; the Gap of Dunloe road is best avoided in ice.