Kate Kearney’s Cottage
A historic family-run pub and restaurant at the entrance to the Gap of Dunloe. Check the website for current food service and opening times.
Gap of Dunloe, Beaufort, Killarney, Co. KerryHardGully · Reeks
Corrán Tuathail
Black Ladder.
An ascent of Corrán Tuathail (Carrauntoohil) from the Black Valley by the steep Black Ladder, returning along the same line.
Also known as Carrauntoohil.
DISTANCE
8.93km
ASCENT
904m
HIGH POINT
1,010m
Steep, loose mountain ground GRADE GUIDE ↗
Reading the map…
INTERACTIVE TERRAIN · ACTUAL GPX TRACKACTUAL GPX TRACK
There’s no recorded time for this route. Build your own from pace, ascent, ground, weather and daylight.
01 · DECIDE
Is this your day?
ELEVATION PROFILE
133 m to 1,010 m.
The profile climbs from the Black Valley floor to the summit and comes back down the same line.
Reading the forecast
904 m ascent · 904 m descent
THE LINE
A hard line through the Black Ladder.
The route approaches Carrauntoohil from the Black Valley before turning into the Black Ladder’s steep, loose gully. It reaches the summit area and comes back down the same line to the start.
The blank on the sheet
The Black Ladder is not named on the Ordnance Survey sheets. The Devil’s Ladder beside it is, and so is the Top of the Ladder above that, but the gully this route climbs is a walkers’ name carried by use rather than by record. Neither ladder is in the Placenames Database, and where the name comes from is not written down anywhere either. The likely answer is the Black Valley on the southern side, which is the way the gully is usually climbed and the way this route comes at it: the track starts on the valley floor at 139 metres, nearly three kilometres south-east of the summit.
The ground around them is named, and thoroughly. Faill Dhubh, Cnoc na Toinne, Com na Gige, Eisc na Gige and the Bóthar na Gige zig-zags are all on the sheet for this corner of the Reeks. The two ladders are the blanks in the middle of it.
The cairn and the cross
What the route reaches at the top is a cairn the Survey calls of dubious antiquity: six metres by five, built of loose flat slabs gathered off the summit scree, and long since rebuilt into a climbers’ shelter. There are two other shelters up there. The large iron cross north of it went up in 1950.
Twenty-two metres off the line, at the north-west end of the saddle ridge on Carrauntoohil’s south-east side, is a square hut of rough construction two metres across, its upper courses rebuilt.
At the end of the Black Valley
Lower down, fifty-eight metres off the line, is a children’s burial ground. It sits in boggy pasture at the west end of the Black Valley, a little north-east of where the Glashankilleen stream meets the Cummeenduff river: a raised rectangle, fifteen metres by nineteen, walled on three sides. Inside are numerous uninscribed grave-markers and ten small mounds, averaging 2.3 by 1.5 metres, which may cover graves. Local information has it in use into the early twentieth century.
A metre further off the track, on the north bank of the Cummeenduff, is a subcircular enclosure eight and a half metres across, a sod-covered stony bank barely half a metre high, which appears on no Ordnance Survey map.
- 01Valley approachLower ground leads towards the base of the Black Ladder.
- 02The Black LadderA steep, loose ascent demands care with footing and rockfall.
- 03CarrauntoohilThe route reaches about 1,010 m, beside the summit cairn and the 1950 cross.
- 04Retraced descentThe route comes back down the same line to the start.
Black Ladder is retained as the walkers’ name for the recorded line. The surrounding names are read from the Ordnance Survey sheets. The Faill Dhubh named here is distinct from the cliff above Brother O’Shea’s Gully. The track starts and finishes on the Black Valley side at 139 m and passes within about forty metres of the summit; these are measurements from the recording, not evidence for the origin of the gully’s name. The Black Valley reading is exactly that, a reading: no source consulted here gives an etymology for it. The summit cairn is Archaeological Survey record KE073-047, the hut KE073-049, the children’s burial ground KE073-011 and the enclosure KE073-043, all described from A. O’Sullivan and J. Sheehan, The Iveragh Peninsula: An Archaeological Survey of South Kerry (Cork University Press, 1996), with the pile-of-stones description from Hayward (1945). Every distance is measured from my GPX to the published coordinate. The burial ground is a graveyard and the markers are unmarked: it is somewhere to leave alone rather than look for.
Forecast for around 900 m
Reading the forecast…
NOW
WIND
TODAY’S PEAK RAIN CHANCE
Reading the forecast…
–cloud
–humidity
–km/h peak gust
Strongest wind today–
Peak gust–
RECENT RAINFALL · LIKELY GROUND
NEXT SIX HOURS · swipe
Reading the forecast
Forecast. This is a modelled estimate for this route’s high ground; conditions can differ sharply across the mountain. Derived from Open-Meteo forecast data ↗.
HAZARDS & OPTIONSKnow the commitment.
The Black Ladder is steep, loose and serious mountain terrain.
Rockfall is a risk. Keep space between walkers and avoid dislodging stones.
Cloud can remove visibility quickly around the summit and upper gully.
The descent retraces steep ground and may be more difficult when wet or tired.
Turn back before entering the steepest ground if conditions, visibility or confidence are poor. Once committed high in the gully, reversing direction may itself be difficult. Don’t rely on this GPX alone to navigate.
FROM THE MOUNTAIN
My photographs.
03 · GO
Getting there.
Start well.
STARTBlack Valley, near a farmyard
Select coordinates to copy
The walk starts and finishes in the Black Valley, near a farmyard. There’s no car park, so park without blocking the road, gates or the yard, and check land access and path conditions before you set out.
ROUTE FILE
Take the route with you.
My GPX, with a short mapped section where the recording missed part of the return. The map shows it in yellow.
My recording has no timestamps, so there’s no recorded time for this route. Orange shows my track. Yellow shows a short mapped section where the recording missed a stretch of the return.
Download original GPXcarrauntoohil-black-ladder.gpx · as recorded
Confirm the download when your browser asks, then open the file from your browser’s downloads and your mapping app will offer to take it. HiiKER and Garmin Explore both do; the route loads on HiiKER’s free tier, though its EastWest mapping of the Irish uplands is a paid layer. Onto a watch: import the GPX into Garmin Connect, Komoot or Strava and send it to the device from there.
Read the ground. Keep your margin.
Conditions can change the seriousness of any route.
Before you leave
- Check the forecast and warnings
- Plan your daylight
- Save the GPX or an offline map
- Pack footwear and layers
- Share your route and return time
Leave a plan.
Tell someone your route and return time. For emergencies in Ireland call 112 or 999 and ask for Mountain Rescue.
More routes nearby
All 33 routes →AFTER THE WALK
Post-hike picks.
A small, personal shortlist around Black Valley and Gap of Dunloe.