And the very first panorama was the view from Aghadoe Heights, just minutes up the road from our very own Aghadoe Cottage.
About 1 p.m., we roused ourselves for a drive up the road. Aghadoe Heights runs lengthwise (east-west) along a ridge, with a pretty rural view to the north and a magnificent panorama to the south.
The day was dull with occasional
spots of rain and a slightly hazy 
atmosphere; the view would have been even more wonderful on a fine day. To the far left (east, above left) were Aghadoe Church and the tiny Norman castle; to the far right (west, above right), the distant peaks of the Iveragh Peninsula. Between them were vistas (below, L to R) of Killarney; Lough Leane with the romantic “Bricin” Bridge (just visible if you click on the middle photo); the unnamed mountain range south of the lake; and to the south-west, Ireland’s highest mountain range, Macgillicuddy’s Reeks (“reeks” being related to “ricks” as in “hayricks!”) .
When we’d looked our fill, we walked over to the castle. Its official name is “Parkavonear Castle,” which comes from the Irish paírc an mhóinéir, meaning “field of the meadow.” (’Sfaras we can tell, the English spelling is a pretty accurate reflection of the Irish pronunciation.) Not much is 
known about its history, but it’s Norman (13th century) and, unusually, cylindrical rather than square.
Originally you’d have had to get into it via a ladder to the 1st floor (it probably had three or four storeys when built), but someone made a convenient ground-floor entrance at some time, which is right next to the staircase that leads up inside the 6ft-thick wall to the doorway to the upper story. We went in, and up, and looked across the space where the wooden floor and its timber beam supports long ago fell away, leaving the sockets; there’s the remains of a first-floor fireplace, and a window opposite it (unless it’s the original doorway!), but the whole castle’s quite tiny, just a few metres across—more of a stumpy tower, really.
One thing that struck us as mysterious was a fine layer of black, fibrous- or tarry-looking
material, which meandered round the tower at a little above head height. It would have separated layers of stones, except that as well as extending horizontally, it went up several layers at some points and down at others. Occasionally it would divide and go both up and down. We later saw the same sort of thing at the nearby church, which is mostly a century or so older, and wondered if it had something to do with modern conservation work. If any reader of this blog knows what it’s about, please leave us a comment!
The castle is surrounded by an overgrown squarish bank with a shallow ditch outside it: a wall and moat, with a gap in the north-east corner. This led us through to the lane that runs down between the castle and Aghadoe church, so we walked down the road to a stile that gave us access up through the wall and into the churchyard.
The church is roofless and ruined, we don’t know how recently, but was founded (as part of a small monastery) in the 7th Century. Before getting to it, we had to pass through the graveyard, which is still in use. There were quite modern graves and headstones, redolent of Irish Catholic piety; but 
also more-or-less simple iron crosses to mark the locations of graves whose headstones had vanished. We were particularly touched by a grave quite near to the road; it commemorated Cornelius Harrington, an obviously much-loved father and avid soccer fan, who died in 2006 at the age of 59. It was evident from the surrounding decoration that his headstone had only very recently been dedicated.
Ruined though it is, the church itself has several interesting features, including the stump of a round tower, the Romanesque west doorway (12th century), the lancet windows at the east end (13th century), some carved wall decorations, including a human head (also 13th century), and a rather naïve-looking stone-carved crucifixion scene (17th century, shown). There’s also a rectangular stone, broken at both ends, deposited atop the remains of the south wall, with an ancient (6th century?) inscription in the Ogham (“Owe-um”) alphabet: almost certainly a gravestone or similar memorial marker. It once commemorated someone named BRRUANANN, but of course no-one now knows who Bruanann (or Brenann) was.
We went back to Aghadoe Cottage to drop the photos to the laptop and annotate them before we forgot. Then about 8 p.m., we walked down to the Old Killarney Inn (so called) for dinner.
The Old Killarney Inn provides a dining experience we’d definitely recommend. Stay away from it!—that’s our recommendation! Well, okay: maybe we’re being a bit harsh; if you exercise careful control over what you ask for, you might have a better experience than we did. 
We both ordered the “prawn salad” for entrée. The prawns were plentiful but were actually rather flavourless tinned (we think) shrimps, presented with a Marie Rose sauce on two slices of a rather coarse brown bread—not a criticism of the bread, it was good and tasty, but made a bit soggy by the liquor from the “prawns”. The main spoiler, though, was the huge quantity of “salad” that came with it: chopped up stale vegetably stuff made anonymous by the greasy creamy dressing, and occupying fully half of a large dinner plate.
Neither of us ate very much of the salad, but finishing off the shrimps-n-bread left us overprepared (or underprepared) for the main course. Margaret’s sirloin steak was a little overcooked, and “okay but not stunning”; Don’s burger (“Mac’s Famous Rock Burger, €9.50”) was actually very good, but what we’d failed to do was say, “please hold the salad,” because each dish was served with another half-plate of the same turgid vegetably mess. Moreover, Don’s dinner plate being full, the chips were served separately in a vast basket!—excellent chips, but thousands of them (you think we exaggerate?) …
We ate as much as we could, but, after the huge “entrées” (even though we hadn’t finished them), neither of us had room left to do justice to the mains. A pity, and overall it left us with the negative impression you might have picked up by now.
So … back to Aghadoe Cottage, and a good night’s sleep to make up for it.
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