Derrymore
Glen Loop.

The loughs, and the sluice gates

The loughs above the glen are not left the way they were found. Stone walls are banked along their edges, built to hold the water back and send it down to a mill at Derrymore, and the account locally is that a man walked up here every morning to open the sluice gates and let it go, then climbed back to close them again, as many as three trips in a day. Whatever the ground feels like on the way up, somebody did it as work.

The mill at Derrymore

Morgan O’Flaherty’s local account places the mill in operation from the early 1800s and describes successive work with grain, wool and flax. It also recalls a railway platform serving the mill and its demolition in the 1960s. The story of the tower resisting demolition, its mortar mixed with sand and shell, is part of that telling. The dammed loughs give the account a visible connection between the high glen and work below.

The chair and the table

Two of Fionn’s things sit on this loop, and it is the only recorded line that goes close to both. Ten metres off the track, a shelf of sandstone above the bay is Fionn MacCumhail’s Chair on the modern sheet and Fin Mac Cools Chair on the historic six-inch. Later, at the back of the glen behind the boulder field, is his table: King’s Table on the sheet now, Fin Mac Cool’s Table on the older one.

The modern map retains Fionn’s name for the Chair. The Table has changed from Fin Mac Cool’s Table to King’s Table; the two features have not followed the same history of naming.

Above the corries

From the loughs the route crosses rough high ground and reaches approximately 827 m before completing a broad circuit above the corries. The return descends towards the original approach with views opening north across Tralee Bay.