Kate Kearney's Cottage
The famous pub and restaurant at the mouth of the Gap of Dunloe, trading on this spot for nearly two centuries. Named for the celebrated beauty who once sold illicit poitin here to Victorian tourists, it is now the traditional first and last stop for anyone walking or riding through the Gap - a place for a bowl of soup, a pint and a tune before the wilderness begins.
Every journey through the Gap of Dunloe begins or ends at Kate Kearney's Cottage, the low-slung pub and restaurant that guards the northern mouth of the pass, about twenty minutes' drive from Killarney on the Beaufort side. Cars stop here; beyond, the old road through the Gap belongs to walkers, cyclists, ponies and jaunting cars, which gather in the yard outside waiting for custom. That simple fact has made the Cottage one of the busiest crossroads of Kerry tourism for the best part of two hundred years.
The name is no marketing invention. Kate Kearney was a real woman - by all accounts a famous beauty - who kept a shebeen on this spot in the years before the Great Famine, selling her own fierce mountain poitin, politely styled 'Kate Kearney's Mountain Dew', to the first generation of tourists being led into the Gap by guides and boatmen. Illegal whiskey and a beautiful barmaid proved an irresistible combination: she was written into song and story ('Oh, did you ne'er hear of Kate Kearney? She lives on the banks of Killarney...') and her legend outlived both her and the shebeen. When a respectable pub rose on the site, there was only one possible name for it.
What became of Kate herself is uncertain: she disappears from the record around the Famine, and accounts differ on whether she died or emigrated. No portrait of her exists, nor could one - she was gone before photography ever reached this corner of Kerry, and the famous beauty survives only in the song and in travellers' tales. The Victorian tourist trade refused to let that spoil things: for the next sixty years 'Kate Kearney' simply became a role, played at the cottage door by a succession of local women. Visitors could meet her 'granddaughter', buy her photograph and be served mountain dew for the camera - historians of Killarney tourism describe meeting Kate as a performance the Gap staged for every generation of arrivals. At the Gap, the legend has always been better business than the facts.
Today's Cottage is a big, busy operation - bar, restaurant and craft shop - geared to the flow of Gap traffic. The food is straightforward and plentiful (soups, seafood chowder, Irish stew, sandwiches), there is Guinness and, in season, traditional music in the bar on many evenings. It can be thronged in high summer when the coach-and-boat day trips are running; go early, late, or out of season and it recovers much of its country-pub character.
Practically, this is the place to park, eat, use the toilets and settle your plans before committing to the Gap - it is eleven kilometres of mountain road to Lord Brandon's Cottage on the far side, with nothing sold in between. Jaunting cars and pony rides negotiate from the yard; walkers and cyclists simply carry on past the pub and let the mountains close in around them.
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